Terminal Tip: Scan Wireless Traffic.

Terminal Tip: Scan For Wireless Networks.

Tue, Mar 18, 2008

I stumbled across a photo in our Flickr group that really peaked my curiosity. Apparently apple has shipped a binary that lets you view your wireless info, as well as wireless access point information in the terminal. I had no Idea that this existed, so I asked theshizabox in his comments to fill me in. He was nice enough to pass along the information, so I thought I would post it here.

The binary resides in this location.

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/sbin/airport

In order to use the ‘airport’ command from anywhere in the terminal you need to create a link to it. You can do it by copying and pasting this code into your terminal.

sudo ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/sbin/airport

Now for the fun.

You can use the airport command to do a number of things, and you can get the information by typing. ‘airport -h’. This will give you the help file. The most notable things you can use is ‘airport -s’ which will scan for all the wireless networks in your area, and ‘airport -I’ which will give you a listing of information about the wireless network you are connected to.

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This post was written by:

Joshua Schnell - who has written 363 posts on Macgasm.

Well, I'm pretty much addicted to all things Apple, and Twitter. That's probably all you really need to know. If I'm not posting here, I'm probably wasting time on Twitter.

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asciilogic aka theshizabox 9 months ago 1 point
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OS X never ceases to amaze. I love the fact that it is a UNIX OS...and can be managed from the command line.

As for managing the wireless from the command line...I absolutely love it. Of course, you can use ifconfig to manage the interface...but the ability to manage the "wireless networks" is extremely fascinating...think about it...you could write scripts to manage wireless connections etc...

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Joshua Schnell 9 months ago 1 point
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The *nix shell was one of the major reasons why I switched from windows to os x a couple years ago. The only things i've found to piss me off... is the inability to switch to passive mode on my wireless card... *shudders*

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