Option #1: Scan and list available WiFi networks using nmcli

nmcli dev wifi

sudo nmcli dev wifi

nmcli -f ALL dev wifi

-m multiline

nmcli -m multiline -f ALL dev wifi

-t

nmcli -t -f ALL dev wifi

rescan

nmcli dev wifi rescan

Option #2: Get a list of available WiFi networks using wavemon

Fedora:

sudo dnf install wavemon

Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Elementary OS and other Debian or Ubuntu based Linux distributions:

sudo apt install wavemon

openSUSE:

sudo zypper install wavemon

Arch Linux / Manjaro:

sudo pacman -S wavemon

sudo wavemon

F3

This can be useful to scan available WiFi networks to quickly see their signal strength, see their channels to know which WiFi channel to use for less interference, and so on.There are multiple ways / tools to scan for available WiFi networks and list their details, but in this article I'll only list 2 which are easy to use and provide enough information for this task. nmcli , a command line tool for controlling and reporting the network status, can scan and list available WiFi networks regardless of the WiFi being connected to a network or not. This should already be installed on your Linux distribution, it doesn't require specifying the interface name, and can work without super user (sudo) privileges by default or at least that's the case in my test on both Fedora and Ubuntu.This is how the command output looks:I've seen some users saying that they had to run nmcli with sudo to get it to show available wireless networks, but that wasn't the case when trying this on Fedora 31 and 30, or on Ubuntu 19.10 or 18.04. Still, in case nmcli doesn't show anything, try running it with sudo:Screenshot:This shows the scanned WiFi details in a tabular view. In case you want to switch to multiline view, so you don't have to expand the terminal window width to see all the details, use, like this:, use the terse () output mode:, use theoption: wavemon is terminal user interface (TUI) that uses ncurses, which monitors wireless signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters. Use this instead of nmcli, if you're not using NetworkManager, or if you simply prefer this over nmcli.Using it you can get a list of available Wifi access points, regardless if you're connected to a WiFi network or not. The tool requires super user permissions (e.g. run it with sudo) to scan for available Wifi networks by default.wavemon can show the following information for available (scanned) WiFi networks: SSID, BSSID (access point mac address), signal quality, signal strength, WiFi channel, and frequency.NowTo scan for available WiFi networks pressto switch to the scan tab.back in April, 2019.