Linux list wifi network

Is there a tool to display WiFi information in console?

Can I view detected WiFi networks details (like signal strength, encryption etc.) in command line? The more detailed — the better.

6 Answers 6

Assuming your wireless is wlan0 , of course. If you’re not sure, iwconfig should tell you.

@Ivan I think the GUI applet has some kind of caching and/or sets the limit for a viable wireless network higher or lower than the defaults in iwlist

Under Linux, you can use the iw* series of commands to configure and display information about wireless networks:

• iwconfig — configure a wireless network interface
• iwlist — Get more detailed wireless information from a wireless interface
• iwpriv — configure optionals (private) parameters of a wireless network interface
• iw — show / manipulate wireless devices and their configuration

Note: iw is the second generation utility, and should be used in preference over iwconfig , iwlist and iwpriv .

Here is a rather comprehensive list. One particularly nice way is:

watch -n 1 cat /proc/net/wireless 

sudo apt-get install network-manager nmcli dev wifi 

The only command that listed all wifi networks and their signal strength on an interface that «doesn’t support scanning» according to iwlist wlan0 scan .

Actually are all commands ( iwconfig , iwlist , . ) replaced with newest tool iw . to show signal and other info:

where wlan0 is interface name.

To fetch wireless signal informations you can use this command :

You must log in to answer this question.

Related

Hot Network Questions

Subscribe to RSS

To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader.

Site design / logo © 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA . rev 2023.7.14.43533

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
This site is not affiliated with Linus Torvalds or The Open Group in any way.

By clicking “Accept all cookies”, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy.

Источник

How to scan Wifi network from terminal in Linux

Scanning for wifi networks will show you the ssids of all the wifi networks in your neighbourhood that your wifi adapter can detect or connect to. By default the gui network manager apps do this in kde and gnome desktop environments.

However you can also scan the wifi networks from the command prompt. In this article we take a look at some simple commands that can be used to list out all the wifi networks that can be seen by the wifi adapter.

1. iwlist

The iwlist command when run with root privileges can scan and list out the wifi networks. Using grep we can extract the specific piece of information we are interested in. Here is a minimal example:

$ sudo iwlist wlp0s20f3 scan | grep -i 'frequency\|ssid\|signal' Frequency:2.442 GHz (Channel 7) Quality=36/70 Signal level=-74 dBm ESSID:"AirtelFiber" Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1) Quality=43/70 Signal level=-67 dBm ESSID:"TP-Link_6018" Frequency:2.422 GHz (Channel 3) Quality=33/70 Signal level=-77 dBm ESSID:"Himadri" Frequency:2.432 GHz (Channel 5) Quality=31/70 Signal level=-79 dBm ESSID:"dlink-15A3" Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6) Quality=30/70 Signal level=-80 dBm ESSID:"OnePlus 5" Frequency:2.447 GHz (Channel 8) Quality=33/70 Signal level=-77 dBm ESSID:"Krishna" Frequency:2.457 GHz (Channel 10) Quality=29/70 Signal level=-81 dBm ESSID:"JioFiber-01" Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11) Quality=25/70 Signal level=-85 dBm ESSID:"Ayush22" Frequency:5.18 GHz (Channel 36) Quality=22/70 Signal level=-88 dBm ESSID:"Ayush22_5G" Frequency:5.22 GHz (Channel 44) Quality=24/70 Signal level=-86 dBm ESSID:"Himadri_5G" Frequency:2.417 GHz (Channel 2) Quality=33/70 Signal level=-77 dBm ESSID:"deep wifi" Frequency:2.452 GHz (Channel 9) Quality=23/70 Signal level=-87 dBm ESSID:"Subash_ext" Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11) Quality=22/70 Signal level=-88 dBm ESSID:"angshu" Frequency:5.745 GHz Quality=26/70 Signal level=-84 dBm ESSID:"AirtelFiber_5GHz" $

You need to specify the interface name of your wifi adapter. If you don’t already know that use the iwconfig command to find it.

Note that it is important to run the command with root privileges. Without root the command will run but the output will not be accurate and keep changing everytime.

We can see the ssid, signal level, frequency band and channel number of each wifi network. This is useful information!

2. iw command

The next command is iw and it can scan the wifi networks as well.

$ sudo iw dev wlp0s20f3 scan | grep -i 'ssid\|signal\|^bss' BSS 98:35:ed:d4:e1:48(on wlp0s20f3) -- associated signal: -66.00 dBm SSID: AirtelFiber BSS ac:84:c6:f4:60:18(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -62.00 dBm SSID: TP-Link_6018 BSS b6:a7:c6:53:cf:00(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -79.00 dBm SSID: BSS b4:a7:c6:53:cf:00(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -80.00 dBm SSID: Himadri HESSID: 00:00:00:00:00:00 BSS b4:b0:24:3f:29:44(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -79.00 dBm SSID: deep wifi BSS 8c:a3:99:d3:79:f3(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -83.00 dBm SSID: JioFiber-01 BSS 98:35:ed:d4:e1:4c(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -82.00 dBm SSID: AirtelFiber_5GHz BSS b4:a7:c6:53:cf:01(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -85.00 dBm SSID: Himadri_5G BSS b6:a7:c6:53:cf:01(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -84.00 dBm SSID: BSS 8c:a3:99:2f:a9:fd(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -84.00 dBm SSID: Ayush22_5G BSS 0c:80:63:76:5f:90(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -79.00 dBm SSID: Krishna BSS 7a:22:e5:f1:83:6d(on wlp0s20f3) signal: -83.00 dBm SSID: OnePlus 5 $

The output has lots of information quite similar to the iwlist command.

3. nmcli command

The nmcli command is actually a tool to control NetworkManager from the terminal. And it can used to query the interface for available wifi networks. Here is a quick example.

Note that we need not provide the interface name of the wifi adapter with nmcli.

$ nmcli dev wifi list IN-USE BSSID SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY AC:84:C6:F4:60:18 TP-Link_6018 Infra 1 270 Mbit/s 64 ▂▄▆_ WPA2 * 98:35:ED:D4:E1:48 AirtelFiber Infra 7 130 Mbit/s 53 ▂▄__ WPA2 B4:B0:24:3F:29:44 deep wifi Infra 2 270 Mbit/s 39 ▂▄__ WPA2 B4:A7:C6:53:CF:00 Himadri Infra 3 130 Mbit/s 39 ▂▄__ WPA2 60:63:4C:84:15:AA dlink-15A3 Infra 5 270 Mbit/s 35 ▂▄__ WPA1 WPA2 8C:A3:99:D3:79:F3 JioFiber-01 Infra 10 130 Mbit/s 34 ▂▄__ WPA2 0C:80:63:76:5F:90 Krishna Infra 8 405 Mbit/s 32 ▂▄__ WPA2 8C:A3:99:2F:A9:FC Ayush22 Infra 11 130 Mbit/s 29 ▂___ WPA2 8A:D8:1B:26:FC:02 -- Infra 9 195 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ WPA2 8C:A3:99:2F:A9:FD Ayush22_5G Infra 36 270 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ WPA2 B6:A7:C6:53:CF:01 -- Infra 44 270 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ WPA2 98:35:ED:D4:E1:4C AirtelFiber_5GHz Infra 149 270 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ WPA2 10:62:EB:1D:D2:F5 Debnath_Adv2 Infra 1 270 Mbit/s 25 ▂___ WPA1 WPA2 7A:22:E5:F1:83:6D OnePlus 5 Infra 6 130 Mbit/s 25 ▂___ WPA2 B4:A7:C6:53:CF:01 Himadri_5G Infra 44 270 Mbit/s 24 ▂___ WPA2 84:D8:1B:26:FC:02 Subash_ext Infra 9 195 Mbit/s 22 ▂___ WPA1 WPA2 84:D8:1B:14:9F:D0 Joydip Infra 10 270 Mbit/s 22 ▂___ WPA2 60:E3:27:7B:2B:D4 angshu Infra 11 135 Mbit/s 20 ▂___ WPA2 $

The nmcli command generates a fancy colorful output with a nice looking signal strength bar graph. The output is quite well formatted also.

Conclusion

That was a quick list of commands to query wifi networks from the command shell. If you want to learn more about wifi commands in linux check out our previous articles.

A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected] .

Источник

How can I get a list of available wireless networks on Linux?

I would like to get a list of the wireless networks available. Ideally this would be via some C call, but I don’t mind if I have to kludge it with a system call. Even better if the required C call or program doesn’t require some exotic 3rd party package. The internet seems to suggest I use sudo iwlist scan which does seem to do the trick from the command line, but I’d rather not require root permissions. I only want to see the basics, not change anything.

You do not need to be root to run iwlist, but it will only report the cached values from the last periodic scan. To force a new scan you do need to be root.

3 Answers 3

It’s pretty easy to do a scan in the command line. The man pages are your friend here (check out iwconfig and iwlist). But using the C interface is a little more difficult so I’ll focus on that.

First of all, as other people have mentioned, definitely download out the wireless tools source code. All the documentation for the programming interface is in the .c files. As far as I can tell, there is no web documentation for the api. However, the source code is pretty easy to read through. You pretty much only need iwlib.h and iwlib.c for this question.

While you can use iw_set_ext and iw_get_ext , the libiw implements a basic scanning function iw_scan , from which you can extract most of the information that you need.

Here is a simple program to get the ESSID for all available wireless networks. Compile with -liw and run with sudo .

#include #include #include int main(void) < wireless_scan_head head; wireless_scan *result; iwrange range; int sock; /* Open socket to kernel */ sock = iw_sockets_open(); /* Get some metadata to use for scanning */ if (iw_get_range_info(sock, "wlan0", &range) < 0) < printf("Error during iw_get_range_info. Aborting.\n"); exit(2); >/* Perform the scan */ if (iw_scan(sock, "wlan0", range.we_version_compiled, &head) < 0) < printf("Error during iw_scan. Aborting.\n"); exit(2); >/* Traverse the results */ result = head.result; while (NULL != result) < printf("%s\n", result->b.essid); result = result->next; > exit(0); > 

DISCLAIMER: This is just a demonstration program. It’s possible for some results to not have an essid. In addition, this assumes your wireless interface is «wlan0». You get the idea.

Read the iwlib source code!

Источник