Question

I’m using two short UNIX commands in my python script to get some data about nearby wireless access points.

• n°1, gets the ESSID of the access point :

"iwlist NIC scan | grep ESSID | awk '{print $1}'"

• n°2, gets the signal strength of the access point :

"iwlist NIC scan | grep level | awk '{print $3}'"

My problem is that I use these two commands one after the other which means that it doesn’t generate “symmetric” data. You might get 6 ESSIDs and 4 Signal strength data.

Because the first time, the script found 6 APs (A, B, C, D, E and F) and the next time only 4 APs (A, C, E and F).

Some my question is the following :

• Is there a way to “split” the result of the first iwlist NIC scan and then apply two different grep and awk sequences to the same input ?

Just so that you at least get a symmetric list of results.

Thank you in advance !

Answer 1

#!/bin/bash
iwlist <NIC> scan > tmpfile
grep -i ESSID tmpfile | awk '{print $1}'
grep -i level tmpfile | awk '{print $3}'
rm tmpfile

A script something like this might just do what you’re expecting.