wifi iw tool introduce

 About iw

iw is a new nl80211 based CLI configuration utility for wireless devices. It supports almost all new drivers that have 
been added to the kernel recently.

iw is still under development. Features are added 'as we go'. The only documentation that exists for iw is this page.
 Please help expand it.

There is a page listing use cases with iwconfig and iw: replacing iwconfig. 

Getting iw

Release tarballs of iw are available from http://linuxwireless.org/download/iw/.

Alternatively, you can download iw from git: http://git.sipsolutions.net/iw.git, the web interface can also create tarballs
 for arbitrary revisions. 

Build requirements

    
    libnl >= libnl1

    libnl-dev >= libnl-dev-1
    pkg-config 

Using iw requires you to have libnl, the first working version is 1.0 pre8 as this release introduced genl, Generic Netlink,
which nl80211 relies on. Most distributions are shipping 1.1 these days. If your distribution's libnl is a wrong version 
then you'll have to download and compile libnl yourself for now (http://git.kernel.org/?p=libs/netlink/libnl.git;a=summary). 

 How to Build

cd iw 

make 

sudo make install

 Table iw and iwconfig comparison for common scenarios

 

Option	iwconfig	iw
Getting device capabilities	iwconfig	iw list
Scanning	iwlist wlan0 scan	iw dev wlan0 scan
Getting info on wlan0	iwconfig wlan0	iw dev wlan0 link
Connecting to an open network	iwconfig wlan0 essid xyz	iw wlan0 connect xyz
Setting the channel	iwconfig wlan0 essid xyz freq 2432	iw wlan0 connect xyz 2432
Connecting to a protectd network(WPA/WPA2)	Use wpa_supplicant with the -te nl80211 option: wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -Dnl80211 -c <config file>	Use wpa_supplicant with the -te nl80211 option: wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -Dnl80211 -c <config file>
Connecting to a protected network(WEP)iwconfig wlan0 key s:abcde iwconfig wlan0 key [2]0011223344 1	iwconfig wlan0 key '[2]' iwconfig wlan0 essid xyz	iw wlan0 connect xyz keys 0:abcde d:1:0011223344
Join an IBSS	iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc iwconfig wlan0 essid xyz	iw wlan0 set type ibss iw wlan0 ibss join xyz
Leave an IBSS	iwconfig wlan0 essid off	iw wlan0 ibss leave