That doesn’t really solve the problem. Those shell tokens are still getting parsed and interpreted as special tokens only you’re now doing it in your host appli

That doesn’t really solve the problem. Those shell tokens are still getting parsed and interpreted as special tokens only you’re now doing it in your host application rather than the Borne shell. And as you’ve pointed out, reimplementing shell syntax is non-trivial and highly error prone. Plus if you’re going to those lengths then you’re better off embedding a Lua/Python/Perl/whatever interpreter in your application.