passing JVM arguments to Grails commands (eg run-app)

I ran into a funny situation where I needed to pass some jvm arguments to a grails app. JMX arguments was what I was trying to pass it. I tried a bunch of things but it ended up that I just needed to put them in the GRAILS_OPTS

export GRAILS_OPTS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote"
grails run-app