OS X Wireless Control from the CLI

Here's a hard to find utility in OS X for working with wireless:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport

The utility provides a lot of functionality normally provided by the wireless-tools packages on Linux, such as iwconfig, iwlist, etc. Here's the –help listing of the utility:

$ airport --help
Supported arguments:
 -c[]      --channel=[]         Set arbitrary channel on the card
 -z        --disassociate       Disassociate from any network
 -I        --getinfo            Print current wireless status, e.g. signal info, BSSID, port type etc.
 -s[]      --scan=[]            Perform a wireless broadcast scan.
                                Will perform a directed scan if the optional  is provided
 -x        --xml                Print info as XML
 -P        --psk                Create PSK from specified pass phrase and SSID.
                                The following additional arguments must be specified with this command:
                                --password=  Specify a WPA password
                                --ssid=      Specify SSID when creating a PSK
 -h        --help               Show this help

Unfortunately, the output of the commands are disimilar, so if you're parsing the output of the command (like I am), you'll need to rebuild your parser.

Also, there is an XML output option, but it uses the goofy Apple dictionary format where keys and values are siblings and maintain no sort of logical relationship. So, it may be easier to parse than the raw output, but you'll probably have to do some gross hacking to get it to work. Does anyone know of a clean way to parse “plist” xml?

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.