In principle it seems that your basic premise is correct
The interface for wireless tools for linux is at
cat /proc/net/wireless
and gives your basic parameters including link/level/noise
Inter-| sta-| Quality | Discarded packets | Missed | WE
face | tus | link level noise | nwid crypt frag retry misc | beacon | 22
wlan0: 0000 66. -44. -256 0 0 0 0 0 0
and if there is a viable connection with traffic then more data regarding the link and traffic is at
cat /proc/net/dev
Inter-| Receive | Transmit
face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
lo: 442540 7574 0 0 0 0 0 0 442540 7574 0 0 0 0 0 0
wlan0: 11837166 18597 0 0 0 5272 0 0 2650725 18388 0 0 0 0 0 0
So if iwlist
sees 0/0/0 for link/level/noise in /proc/net/wireless
it just reports them and doesn't process any data from there or /proc/dev/net
for the other statistics.
It may also help to understand that
Quality=0/100
is the link quality (the proportion of correctly received packets) while
Quality:0
Is some measure of signal quality (/proc/net/wireless
) reported from your card.
Same word, different usage.
I looked all that up because of your question, but couldn't find the source code for iwlist
to double check. Thanks for the education.
iw wlan1 scan
oriw wlan1 scan dump
(doesn't do a new scan) instead - it will have a consistent format.iw
I get backNo such device (-19)
. The device hasiw
version 3.4. I think it might be that the interface doesn't support thenl80211
driver but I'm not sure. (usingRTL8188
wireless chip)iw
. That "new" tool (since when already?) doesn't seem to be stable or reliable yet, soiwlist
is the way to go, really.