inotifywait in bash script: space

["B.M." <b-misc@gmx.ch>]

Dear all,

not a Debian specific question, but I hope to get an answer here...

I try to use inotifywait in a bash script to block until a file in a directory 
gets changed. Then the script should continue. That's working well unless the 
path I hand over to inotifywait contains spaces.

I already tried to escape them like so:

  MYCOMMAND = "inotifywait  -qqr -e create \"$MYDIR\""

where MYDIR is something like "/tmp/test dir" but although echo shows the 
command correctly and putting the very same command in a shell just works, as 
part of my script it doesn't work. (I don't want to get paths back from 
inotifywait.)

Thanks for any pointers towards clarification and help.

Best,
Bernd