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

Also, gnu expr should allow you to use `?`, but you need to escape it. e.g. 

```sh
~ $ expr "abcd" : "abcd\?"
4
```