My system is android ics. The following command works fine in my system. The libreference-ril.so is the RIL library. The ttyUSB2 is the device node created by drivers.
/system/bin/rild -l /system/lib/libreference-ril.so -- -d /dev/ttyUSB2
The rild is the ril daemon, and it is usually registered as service in init.rc as shown the following.
service ril-daemon /system/bin/rild -l /system/lib/libreference-ril.so -- -d /dev/ttyUSB2
class main
socket rild stream 660 root radio
socket rild-debug stream 660 radio system
user root
group radio cache inet misc audio sdcard_rw log