Escape {} in shellcommnads?

[Josh Hurd]

I am trying to run a shellcommand that includes a call to awk.  Awk requires the use of braces but CFE treats tham as variable substitutuions.  I have tried escaping them with \ with no success.  I've tried using single quotes and double quotes.

Here is a sample:
"/bin/ps axo \"stime,pid,command\" |  /bin/awk ' {print $2 ;} ' "

The error returned is:
Incomplete variable syntax or bracket mismatch

Does anyone know how to pull this off?  I don't want to deploy a one line shell script to all my clients.

Thanks!
Josh