This is similar to JenkinsJENKINS-38624
BZ 94839 - MSBuild Projects no longer work after upgrading to 1.8.0 (https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-38624) which was answered as fixed in version 1.8.1 of the coverity plugin, but this is with gradle instead of MSBuild.

[Gradle] - Launching build.
ERROR: Build step failed with exception
java.lang.RuntimeException: Command line parsing failed: Unclosed single-quoted string.
at jenkins.plugins.coverity.CoverityUtils.evaluateEnvVars(CoverityUtils.java:146)
at jenkins.plugins.coverity.CoverityUtils.prepareCmds(CoverityUtils.java:196)
at jenkins.plugins.coverity.CoverityLauncherDecorator$DecoratedLauncher.launch(CoverityLauncherDecorator.java:356)
at hudson.Launcher$ProcStarter.start(Launcher.java:381)
at hudson.Launcher$ProcStarter.join(Launcher.java:388)
at hudson.plugins.gradle.Gradle.performTask(Gradle.java:294)
at hudson.plugins.gradle.Gradle.perform(Gradle.java:152)
at hudson.tasks.BuildStepMonitor$1.perform(BuildStepMonitor.java:20)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.perform(AbstractBuild.java:782)
at hudson.model.Build$BuildExecution.build(Build.java:205)
at hudson.model.Build$BuildExecution.doRun(Build.java:162)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.run(AbstractBuild.java:534)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1738)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:98)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:410)
Build step 'Invoke Gradle script' marked build as failure