Passing a space-separated System Property via a shell script doesn't work

Question

I have this bash file:

#/bin/bash

PROP="-Dprop=foo bar"

java $PROP -jar Foo.jar

So, what I want to do here is pass a space-separated list as a System Property. But this somehow does not work:

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: bar

So, it seems that Bash breaks -Dprop=foo bar up into -Dprop=foo, bar. I tried everything from double quoting to escaping the space character but nothing seems to work.

Answer 1

You need to add the quotation marks around the shell script $ variable:

PROP="-Dprop=foo bar"

java "$PROP" -jar Foo.jar