[clug] How to Determine which Wireless Lan is connected

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:49 PM, David Schoen <neerolyte at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/9/29 Alex (Maxious) Sadleir <maxious at gmail.com>:
>> As root, you can easily see this in the output of the iwconfig/iwgetid
>> command. These commands aren't accessable as a normal user usually but
>> you can make a user group and give it extra priviledges to the
>> /sbin/iw* files for that if you need to.
>
> Assuming I went and set o-x on /sbin/iwconfig I'd have to stick myself
> in the "root" group or chgrp /sbin/iwconfig to something new and fun.
> I'd consider both to be worse hacks than just "chmod o+x `which
> iwconfig`" (which has its own issues if the distro isn't setting that
> value). Does your distro set some other group on the binary?

Gentoo:
$ ls -l `which iwconfig`
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21900 2008-01-28 23:52 /sbin/iwconfig

Oh, it's not in the path for normal users but it is usable if you
specify the full path. I'd thought it wasn't and others [1] seem to
have made the same mistake (or it really wasn't at one point). In
tab-complete we trust... too much.

1: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=389200