{"id":12,"date":"2008-09-01T23:28:05","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T03:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/?p=12"},"modified":"2011-02-20T23:08:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T03:08:00","slug":"wireless-tools-for-mac-os-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/01\/wireless-tools-for-mac-os-x\/","title":{"rendered":"Wireless tools for Mac OS X"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been having some trouble with my MacBook on a certain wireless network.  OS X has some pretty good GUI tools for configuring the wireless Airport, but <strong>sometimes you need a good command line tool for debugging<\/strong>.  Linux has a pretty good set of tools for this: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hpl.hp.com\/personal\/Jean_Tourrilhes\/Linux\/Tools.html\">Wireless tools for Linux<\/a>.  Despite OS X&#8217;s being built on Unix, no such tools are available.<\/p>\n<p>Upon googling for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=command+line+wireless+tools+mac+os+x\">command line wireless tools os x<\/a>, the first hit was <a href=\"http:\/\/osxdaily.com\/2007\/01\/18\/airport-the-little-known-command-line-wireless-utility\/\">exactly what I was looking for<\/a>.  At the moment that site is down, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&#038;source=web&#038;ct=clnk&#038;cd=1&#038;url=http%3A%2F%2F74.125.95.104%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3ALwEcuDdZaBMJ%3Aosxdaily.com%2F2007%2F01%2F18%2Fairport-the-little-known-command-line-wireless-utility%2F%2Bcommand%2Bline%2Bwireless%2Btools%2Bmac%2Bos%2Bx%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26cd%3D1%26gl%3Dus%26client%3Dfirefox-a&#038;ei=Noy8SMPiCZT8NNGKkfoC&#038;usg=AFQjCNGMFHpUlQe54wVc0T8tGVf2s-9zNg&#038;sig2=Mi9L47Knr8zzMy5A75vy6w\">Google&#8217;s cache<\/a> saves the day.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that OS X comes with a nifty little tool called <code>airport<\/code>, but it&#8217;s not on the default path and buried deep inside the file system.  I added to my path:<\/p>\n<div class=\"srccode\">\n<pre>% sudo ln -s \/System\/Library\/PrivateFrameworks\/Apple80211.framework\/Versions\/Current\/Resources\/airport \/usr\/sbin\/airport<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<p>To print a list of wireless networks currently in range:<\/p>\n<div class=\"srccode\">\n<pre>% airport -s<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<p>To print the current wireless status:<\/p>\n<div class=\"srccode\">\n<pre>% airport -I<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<p>To connect to a specific network SSID:<\/p>\n<div class=\"srccode\">\n<pre>% airport -A&lt;SSID&gt;<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been having some trouble with my MacBook on a certain wireless network. OS X has some pretty good GUI tools for configuring the wireless Airport, but sometimes you need a good command line tool for debugging. Linux has a pretty good set of tools for this: Wireless tools for Linux. Despite OS X&#8217;s being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adamrosenfield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}