wicd fails when essid is one of iwconfig's reserved words (on, off, any)

[bruenig]

When the essid of an access point is "on", "off", or "any", iwconfig requires a special escape syntax.

The usual syntax for access point "foo" is: iwconfig wlan0 essid foo.

For the three keywords "on" "off" and "any", say "any", the syntax is: iwconfig wlan0 essid -- any.

The -- is needed to escape and tell iwconfig that it should ignore that "any" is a keyword and treat it like any other access point name.

Wicd does not respect this. Some simple conditional like: if essid == any or essid == off or essid == on; blah blah blah should fix this.

[Robby Workman (rworkman)]

Are there any drawbacks to just making that "--" *always* be used, regardless of whether it's actually needed?

[bruenig (bruenig)]

No there isn't. I have been doing that on my local wifi scripts since I found this bug and it works exactly as you would expect.

[Adam Blackburn (adamblackburn)]

I've committed this fix to lp:wicd.

=== modified file 'wicd/wnettools.py'
--- wicd/wnettools.py 2009-11-21 17:55:50 +0000
+++ wicd/wnettools.py 2009-11-23 17:43:03 +0000
@@ -856,7 +856,7 @@
         essid -- essid to set the interface to

         """
- cmd = ['iwconfig', self.iface, 'essid', str(essid)]
+ cmd = ['iwconfig', self.iface, 'essid', '--', str(essid)]
         if self.verbose: print str(cmd)
         misc.Run(cmd)

is the patch I used.