If a user boots with the "-P foo.properties" option and they set "jboss.server.base.dir=/path/to/base/dir" property in the property file, the setting is ignored.

Removing the points in standalone.sh where the following is added to the jvm launch command mostly resolves the problem:

-Djboss.server.base.dir=\"$JBOSS_BASE_DIR\" \

The purpose of this JIRA is to figure out why removing that is necessary. The -P option should be processed after that, and that processing should override the -Djboss.server.base.dir=\"$JBOSS_BASE_DIR\" value, but it appears to not be doing so.

Note that fixing whatever is causing the above not to work will still leave a small issue. The small issue is the boot.logfile still goes to standalone/log and the logging.properties that drives that boot.log (i.e. drives logging until the logging subsystem is installed) is in standalone/configuration. If you look at standalone.sh, you can see why – those locations are set based on environment variables set in the script. It needs to be done that way because the logging needs to be configured before all the args passed to main (e.g. -P) are processed.

I don't know of a good solution to the boot.log issues if jboss.server.base.dir is set via -P. The script makes efforts to deal with it if it's set via standalone.conf, but finding and reading the -P file in the script itself seems like overkill. So, I don't regard fixing that to be a goal of this JIRA.