OK, now I see. NumForce still wants to have some data in the $gradient keyword (this is checked separately from the checks that can be circumvented with -c). An easy solution would be to run the grad module once to get the gradients:
dscf>dscf.out
grad>grad.out
NumForce -ex 1 -c -mfile machinefile >numforce.out
jobex -c 500 -energy 7 -gcart 4 -statpt -trans -ex 1
Antti