Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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I find a major difference is that Linux support is harder to understand but OSX support is harder to get.

I've found support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com to be incredibly wanting. This isn't helped in the slightest by the fact that OSX changes tools, even in major versions. If anyone is doubting the "harder to get" claim then I encourage you to search (you can use LLMs) to figure out how to print the SSID you're connected to from the CLI. Such a task is really really simple. I can tell you a bunch of ways to do this on linux with tools like `iw`, `iwconfig`, `nmcli`, or `iwgetid` but I can no longer tell you how to do this on OSX. The linux answer is hard because the tool might change based on your distro or you can install a tool. That requires more understanding. But on OSX, this category of problems don't exist.

If you want the old answer you can see here. None of those work, even with sudo, nor does wtallis's answer, despite this working on an earlier version of Sequoia (FWIW, I'm now on 15.7.3): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41633547

> I encourage you to search (you can use LLMs) to figure out how to print the SSID you're connected to from the CLI.

Yeah, the official Apple support forums are and have always been embarrassingly bad.

I don't use the CLI on my Macs all that often, so there might be a better way to do it, but this works on Tahoe:

  networksetup -listpreferredwirelessnetworks en0 | grep -v '^Preferred networks on' | head -1 | xargs

There's also get-ssid: https://github.com/fjh658/get-ssid

  > networksetup -listpreferredwirelessnetworks en0

On Sequoia this command shows you the history of SSIDs, not the current SSID you're on. For easy verification turn off your WiFi and run the command, you'll get identical output.

Is Tahoe doing something different? If so, honestly that only exemplifies my point of how Apple is creating a difficult ecosystem to navigate through, where the correct incantations change, even through minor versions.

*IT IS MADDENING*

  > There's also get-ssid: https://github.com/fjh658/get-ssid

I think the README is quite illustrative of the problem here. Seems like John ran into the same issue I was! He even mentions the issue with the `-getairportnetwork` flag for `networksetup`.

But get-ssid still has a problem... it requires root. For my original use case I was wanting to run ssh proxy jumps and rsyncs based on the SSID I'm connected to. This doesn't really work for those cases. Escalating to root just creates a major security concern and I definitely don't want automated processes doing escalating unless absolutely necessary.

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