Terminal Tip: Scan For Wireless Networks.

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.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.