added support for release candidate versions of sbt

The PR enables support for Release Candidate versions of SBT. Such as this in the build.properties file:
```
sbt.version=0.13.5-RC1
```
This change has been tested with the following applications (as well as a few others):
https://github.com/naaman/spray-bootstrap
https://github.com/jkutner/sample-play-app

i tried escaping -- but i just realized i was using `expr` on my mac (not gnu). I'll fix that.