I fought this all day, and was forcefully removing the old directory. So I had the same hypothesis, but it didn't pan out.
But I did finally get glassfish installed — and do you know what it was? Some other process must have been holding some socket that the setup script wanted access to. The frustrating thing was that it was failing silently, though.
By random chance, I decided to kill all the java processes on my machine and try it again. The problem went away.
Thanks for the reply.
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