How To Show Available WiFi Networks, Their Channels, Signal Strength And More From The Command Line

This article explains how to view available WiFi networks, list their channels, link quality, security, signal strength, and more on Linux using the command line.

This can be useful to scan available WiFi networks to quickly see their signal strength, see their channels to know which WiFi channel to use for less interference, and so on.

There are multiple ways / tools to scan for available WiFi networks and list their details, but in this article I'll only list 2 which are easy to use and provide enough information for this task.

Option #1: Scan and list available WiFi networks using nmcli

nmcli, a command line tool for controlling and reporting the network status, can scan and list available WiFi networks regardless of the WiFi being connected to a network or not. This should already be installed on your Linux distribution, it doesn't require specifying the interface name, and can work without super user (sudo) privileges by default or at least that's the case in my test on both Fedora and Ubuntu.

Use nmcli to show the available wireless networks SSID, mode, channel, transfer rate, signal strength, bars and security used using:

nmcli dev wifi

This is how the command output looks: