A non-Applescript way to pass shell commands?

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Hello,

I want to pass a shell command from an Applescript application. The command is generated from unpredictable user input.

do shell script "echo " & (quoted form of OriginalText & ShellCommand)

returns an error in many cases when the ShellCommand contains single quotes.

One trick that worked for sed I found goes like

do shell script "echo " & quoted form of OriginalText & " | tr '\\r' '\\n' | sed -e " & quoted form of sedCommand

by Aurelio Jargas. Aurelio uses quoted form of to get the single quotes around a sed program while escaping those within the program. I am looking for a trick to allow user input other than sed.

Chrys had explained (2008-09-20 07:15:00 am):

To get the shell to expand a glob pattern but still protect the rest of the string use quoted form of to quote only the non-wildcard parts. The shell will concatenate multiple tokens (each quoted string and the asterisk are tokens) as long as there is no intervening field separator (usually any whitespace).

This would require to break the user input into parts that are quoted-form-of-ed, and parts that are not. Because the input is not predictable, this seems impossible, and I guess I need to use something other than applescript. A “call method” (if that’s nonsense, sorry, I’m new to everything beyond AS)? Is that correct? What should I use?

Willing to learn (even to buy a book, yeah! just give me some directions, please),
LG