Passing variable from shell

Hi I have a problem when running kettle from shell i want to pass the filename variable, but it does not work.

If i run the job from ui and fill the environment variables it works, but i want to populate variables from shell.

i am running the following from shell ($file contains the full path directory with filename)

$KITCHEN -file=$JOB_DIR/$JOB -param:file=$file

it is running, but when reaching file exist part in ETL it cannot find the file i have pushed as param ($file) although when i echo the content it is what i need.

any ideas what i am doing wrong?

thanks in advance