Ygtjki

This question comes from the Software Recomendations StackExchange
site . In a beginning I thought that was the proper place, but
some people suggest this Unix forum fits better.

When an Operating System has several wireless networks available (and known, this is: in its "preferred" list), it is supposed to do an intelligent management of roaming between them, usually connecting to the best one (measuring it by several factors, like coverage or speed).

But, when working with some Linux distros (for example the intended for security auditing ones), I have found such management not so intelligent: sometimes the net keeps down (not behaving completely OK) and the operating system stays on that wireless network.

So, I was thinking about doing a script myself to force Linux to select another wireless network when the connected one slows down or directly fails (maybe checkable by pinging the router/access point).

For what I have read about command-line wireless management, the "connect to" thing seems a bit awkward: issuing multiple commands, editing files... etc.

Does anyone know about a good "switch-to-network" command-line tool running under Linux?
Remember I don't need to connect to a new network: I just want to connect to an already-some-day connected network, so the operating system is supposed to know the password, encryption data and so on.

Possible command-line examples:

switchtowifi --essid MyWiFiNetwork
switchtowifi --essid MyWiFiNetwork --bssid 11:22:33:44:55:66
switchtowifi --channel 5

The first example switches to any already-stored WiFi network named MyWiFiNetwork.

The second example switches to the already-stored WiFi network named MyWiFiNetwork whose BSSID is 11:22:33:44:55:66.

The third example switches to any already-stored WiFi network on channel 5.

Solution using the nmcli tool, included in most distros or easily installable via apt-get, yum ... etc :

To show already-stored WiFi networks:

$ nmcli con
NAME UUID TYPE TIME
Wireless-1 28d6c265-xxxx-4e83-907f-ecb5ab3ac37c 802-11-wireless Thu 
Wired-Network 30d29da3-xxxx-4ea2-94ff-0edac8954ff7 802-3-ethernet Sun 
Wireless-2 89f31b44-xxxx-4b7d-abb1-8242a1fa7040 802-11-wireless Thu 
Wireless-3 6adcb4e8-xxxx-4e88-bf50-872d9e5eb1f3 802-11-wireless Fri 
Wireless-4 8c4fc701-xxxx-472e-aecc-40131c0d8d31 802-11-wireless Fri 

Note the network is stored by a unique UUID identifier.

To connect to any of these networks (example for Wireless-1):

$ nmcli con up uuid 28d6c265-xxxx-4e83-907f-ecb5ab3ac37c

See the man page for more functions, like forget, disconnect, scan or connect to new (not yet stored) network.

The nmcli tool is great: it can work with a specific wireless device (i.e: wlan0) or with any of them in a generic manner (i.e: you just specify wifi and the tool makes in charge of establishing the connection).

Info extracted from here.

Thanks to @ThatGuy for the link.

wicd-curses might be an option:

_{(source: atastypixel.com)}

There's also nmcli.