iwconfig fails with space in essid

Just wondering if others have run into this issue ...

I'm running CentOS 4.6 on a ThinkPad T42 w/ Atheros wireless device.
Madwifi driver works very well, but when I attempt to configure a connection for an AP that has a space in the essid, iwconfig only uses the first word -- even though both are surrounded by double quotes -- and therefore association fails.

This occurs always, if I'm attempting the configuration on the command line or via a script (tried a variety of methods to escape/quote the space, to no avail).

Kernel is 2.6.9-67.0.[15|20|22] & madwifi driver v 0.9.3.3/0.9.4 ... any combination ... makes no difference. Wireless-tools are from installation of wireless-tools-28-0.pre16.3.3.EL4.rpm.

Any thoughts regarding possible resolution would be most welcome.

Thanks!

When entering something like a file name with a space, into a terminal, you add a backslash before the space. This may be all you need to do.

For example, a title like this:
How I Met Your Mother

Would look like this:
How\ I\ Met\ Your\ Mother

Paul,

Thanks -- though the single-backslash-escape was just one of the "... variety of methods to escape/quote the space ..." to which I referred, and results in the same response ... including an error message that seems to indicate the second parameter to the essid argument is being parsed (due to the whitespace) as another (unrecognized) argument ...

Examples:
[root@mysystem ~]# iwconfig ath0 essid "firstword secondword"
iwconfig: unknown command "secondword"
[root@mysystem ~]# iwconfig ath0 essid "firstword\ secondword"
iwconfig: unknown command "secondword"
[root@mysystem ~]# iwconfig ath0 essid 'firstword\ secondword'
iwconfig: unknown command "secondword"
[root@mysystem ~]# iwconfig ath0 essid firstword\ secondword
iwconfig: unknown command "secondword"
[root@mysystem ~]# iwconfig ath0 essid "firstword' 'secondword"
iwconfig: unknown command "'secondword"

As the shell seems to be reliably parsing the command line where
$2 = firstword secondword
I can only assume it's an issue with the iwconfig+extensions+driver chain ... don't know enough about the internals to hazard a guess where.

--NoWiz