How can I print out information about a Wireless Access Point in range?

Question

How can I print out information about a Wireless Access Point in range? Can I for example get the MAC address?

Answer 1

You can use

iwlist <interface> scan

For example:

iwlist wlan0 scan

Also, using pipes and egrep, and practicing a little with iwlist scan, you can extract the info you want:

iwlist wlan0 scan | egrep 'Address:|ESSID:'

Answer 2

If you are on Linux then you can usually just do

ifconfig 

or

iwconfig

to get info on your NIC. To scan you usually do

iwlist wlan0 scan

to get info on the wireless access points in range. In this case your wireless interface has already been identified using ifconfig (or iwconfig) as wlan0.