I had the exact problem on Windows platform and here is what fixed it for me after some investigation.
My PATH variable had something like this:
PATH=.....;C:\WINNT\System32\Wbem;"C:\Program Files\PKWARE\pkzipc";C:\Program Files\Softricity\SoftGrid for Windows Des......
Notice the double quotes around the pkzipc path. I removed the double quotes(") from my PATH env variable and it worked. Go figure!
Anyways, there were little clues such as the [b]asadmin start-domain --verbose[/b] option didn't work...it too complained about the broken path and the jvm.log also had an xml dump which parsed half the path around the pkzipc part. However I see you are on unix but maybe something to look into.
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