Agree the “smart quotes” are definitely a problem…also consider that the environment variables of the running BESClient may differ from the environment of your QNA session, as BESClient is running without a login shell, and hasn’t executed environment entries from .login, .profile, .bashrc, etc.
You may want to create an action to just build an appendfile of the current environment variables, you may need to refactor your approach based on where these variables are defined and whether they are available to your client.