I'm trying to find the name of my active wireless network, out of a list of all available networks.
In order to list all available wireless networks, I call
$ iwlist wlan0 scanning
which gives me a very long output. I can pipe that through a python script found on this page called iwlistparse.py which gives me the pertinent information in a concise format:
Name Address Quality Channel Encryption
\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 59 % 6 WEP
MonkeyIsland XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 53 % 2 WPA v.1
JustChillaxing XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 50 % 6 WPA v.1
RubberDucky XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 44 % 11 WPA v.1
GrapeVine XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 41 % 11 WEP
CompanyPrinter_HP_Officejet_6700 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 41 % 6 Open
WhyYouSniffinMySSID XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 41 % 11 WEP
IAintSniffingYoSSID XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 39 % 11 Open
ShaddupYouTwo_FreeWifiForAll XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 39 % 6 Open
This does not tell me the name of my active wifi, though. For that, I use iwconfig:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"MonkeyIsland"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=39/70 Signal level=-75 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:40 Invalid misc:138 Missed beacon:0
From that, I can grep for ESSID and extract the name, and try to match that against the names returned from iwlist.
But is there an easier way to do this?
I'm not using Network Manager or wicd (BeagleBone Black + Debian w/ hard floats enabled + mono + various USB wifi dongles == hardware/driver compatibility issues)
