I recently discovered sys.process
package in Scala, and was amused by its power.
But when I try to combine it with bash pipes and backticks, I get stuck
You're doing multiple things wrong actually. You should be using the -c option of bash and you should be using a Seq[String] with each parameter to bash in its own String, or the scala library will just split the String at every space character. (This is why Rex Kerr's solution doesn't work.)
scala> import sys.process.stringSeqToProcess
import sys.process.stringSeqToProcess
scala> Seq("bash", "-c", "echo `date`")!!
res20: String =
"Sun Dec 4 16:40:04 CET 2011
"