yeah so I had a good fight with exec and basically I lost (my sanity) :rage: 

if you "eval exec" you need to escape spaces and you can pretty much pass a one big string param - but you also have to be careful with the path expansion of `"${basedir}"/vendor/jar/jruby-complete-*.jar`. - I ended up throwing the towel with this and go with the params array. 

with exec only you get weird problems when having multiple params in a single var, say with JAVA_OPTS, and with a space in one of them. 

bottom line, this really sucks. I'll setup a non-bash Bourne shell tomorrow and find the solution.