wpa supplicant command examples

wpa_supplicant – Wi-Fi Protected Access client and IEEE 802.1X supplicant

In most common cases, wpa_supplicant is started with:

#wpa_supplicant -B -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iwlan0

This makes the process fork into background.

The easiest way to debug problems, and to get debug log for bug reports, is to start wpa_supplicant on foreground with debugging enabled:

#wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iwlan0 -d

If the specific driver wrapper is not known beforehand, it is possible to specify multiple comma separated driver wrappers on the command line. wpa_supplicant will use the first driver wrapper that is able to initialize the interface.

#wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211,wext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iwlan0

wpa_supplicant can control multiple interfaces (radios) either by running one process for each interface separately or by running just one process and list of options at command line. Each interface is separated with -N argument. As an example, following command would start wpa_supplicant for two interfaces:

wpa_supplicant \
-c wpa1.conf -i wlan0 -D nl80211 -N \
-c wpa2.conf -i ath0 -D wext