With Ruby this works fine, but with JRuby 1.0.1 I get an error using the -e switch and parenthesis. (Note: this is the command generated by IntelliJ IDEA to execute Ruby/JRuby so it would be good to get it working Version information is included below as well. RUBY C:\Users\bweber\Documents>ruby -e STDOUT.sync=true;STDERR.sync=true;load($0=ARGV .shift) C:/Users/bweber/IdeaProjects/test_jruby/ruby/test/test.rb hello JRUBY C:\Users\bweber\Documents>jruby -e STDOUT.sync=true;STDERR.sync=true;load($0=ARG V.shift) C:/Users/bweber/IdeaProjects/test_jruby/ruby/test/test.rb ) was unexpected at this time. JRUBY VERSION C:\Users\bweber\Documents>jruby -v ruby 1.8.5 (2007-08-23 rev 4201) [x86-jruby1.0.1] The following example does NOT work with JRuby 1.0.1 as well: jruby -e puts("Hello")