Java – passing space delimited system properties through shell scripts does not work

I have this bash file:

#/bin/bash

PROP="-Dprop=foo bar"

java $PROP -jar Foo.jar

Therefore, what I want to do here is to pass a space - separated list as a system attribute But somehow it didn't work:

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: bar

So bash seems to break - dprop = foo bar up - dprop = foo, bar I tried everything from double quotes to avoiding spatial characters, but it didn't seem to have any effect

Solution

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

PROP="-Dprop=foo bar"

java "$PROP" -jar Foo.jar