Please help me remove the last elements of shell script from my applescript

Question

I read somewhere that running a shell script in an applescript was inefficient and created extra overhead, fine, so I am trying to take all of my shell script out of my applescript (this should fix issues with forward slashes in names as well...)
however I am stuck on these last two lines (I know they are probably trivial but I've been up waaaay too long now) so I was wondering if anyone would be awesome enough to show me how to convert the bash to applescript.
--does a recursive copy and rename
do shell script "cp -R " & (thePath as text) & " " & (theOtherPathWithFile as text)
--does a copy and rename, then a simple move
do shell script "cp " & (quoted form of (POSIX path of this_item as text)) & " " & (theNewPath as text) & "&& mv " & (theOtherPathWithFile as text) & " ~/Desktop"
Any and all help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

There isn't anything wrong with using shell scripts, especially since AppleScript is designed to do this very thing. There is some overhead when using do shell script, just as there is some overhead when using an application tell statement, so it just depends on what you are doing.
The performance of any particular script would also be up to whatever is acceptable to you (or your customers), and sometimes a shell script is the most efficient way to do something. Many of the system utilities are just GUI front-ends to a shell script, so they can't be all bad.
To do your file copy or move with the Finder, you will need to tell it to duplicate or move the item(s) (there is that pesky overhead again). Shell scripts use POSIX paths while the Finder uses colons as its path delimiter, so you will need to use the correct file path references - there is a decent article about that at Satimage. Once your file paths have been defined (or using something like choose file or choose folder)), your script would be something like:
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #DAFFB6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
tell application "Finder"
duplicate source to destination
-- move source to destination
end tell
</pre>
See the Finder and *System Events* scripting dictionaries for more information about the ways they deal with files.