Why do my Jenkins / Ant builds always fail? - selenium

Question

I'm trying to get Jenkins figured out. I have a suite of selenium tests that I can build and run via Eclipse or build and run via the command line with ant, but whenever I try Jenkins, they fail.
The console out from Jenkins reports that the value for ws.jars, defined in my build.xml file, doesn't exist; however that directory does exist! Again, no problem building from the command line.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I've been trying to get this solved now for a couple of days.
Thanks.
My build.xml file:
<property environment="env"/>
<property name="ws.home" value="${basedir}"/>
<property name="ws.jars" value="/Users/username/Documents/All JAR Files/All in one place"/>
<property name="test.dest" value="${ws.home}/build"/>
<property name="test.src" value="${ws.home}/src"/>
<property name="ng.result" value="test-output"/>
I created a new target in my build.xml file called path. Here is the output when I run with Jenkins.
Started by user anonymous
Building in workspace /Users/<user>/local_repo/qa-automation/selenium-java/my-projects
[my-projects] $ /Users/Shared/Jenkins/Home/tools/hudson.tasks.Ant_AntInstallation/Install_automatically/bin/ant path
Buildfile: /Users/<user>/local_repo/qa-automation/selenium-java/my-projects/build.xml
path:
[echo]
[echo] My path - /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_55.jdk/Contents/Home/bin:/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_55.jdk/Contents/Home/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
[echo]
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
Finished: SUCCESS

Answer 1

I suspect this is caused by the spaces within your path of ws.jars. You should escape these spaces by adding \, try change the path :
<property name="ws.jars" value="/Users/username/Documents/All JAR Files/All in one place"/>
with this one:
<property name="ws.jars" value="/Users/username/Documents/All\ JAR\ Files/All\ in\ one\ place/"/>

Answer 2

Thanks everybody for your suggestions. I hadn't thought about this in awhile but last night I had some time and was able to work on this issue again. Turns out it was related to the Jenkins job being executed in the non-interactive shell, just as 'rgulia' pointed out. So finally, I tried copying my ws.jars directory to /Users/Shared/Jenkins, changed the owner to 'jenkins', and boom, my build was able to proceed.
The original error message was just so misleading. It wasn't that the directory didn't exist, but that 'jenkins' didn't have access and/or permissions to it.
I hope this information can help others.