With regard to @mwaisgold 's solution above, I made a couple of quick additions that helped. I added a little bit more to the script to handle authentication, plus the -F flag for curl caused an ambiguous method overloading error with the GroovyShell's evaluate method, so I addressed that by using the -d instead:
#/bin/bash
curl -i -H "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -c cookies.txt -X POST localhost:8080/myapp/j_spring_security_check -d "j_username=admin&j_password=admin"
curl -i -b cookies.txt -d 'code=
int iterations = 0
while (iterations < 10) {
log.error "********** Console Cron Test ${iterations++} ***********"
}
log.error "********** Console Cron Test Complete ***********"
' localhost:8080/myapp/console/execute