Take the 2-minute tour ×  Is there any way to get current
wireless SSID without root permission?  iwconfig tells me ESSID,
but only if I run it as root.  share|improve this question What
happens if you run it as a regular user? What Linux distribution
do you use? Also, you may find Unix & Linux a more suitable site
for such questions. –  Lev Levitsky Sep 1 '12 at 20:09 add
comment  closed as off topic by nandeesh, John Palmer, joran,
DCoder, jonsca Sep 2 '12 at 6:56   1 Answer  up vote 3 down vote
accepted  If you take a look at the source code of the iwconfig
(wireless_tools), you'll see this line:  iwconfig.c:639:
if(iw_get_ext(skfd, ifname, SIOCGIWESSID, &wrq) < 0)  This line
is responsible for the get of ESSID (wireless.h). And i think
that only root have permissions (out of the box) to do this, so
the function iw_get_ext (defined in iwlib.h from wireless_tools
package) which call ioctl will return EPERM (Operation not
permitted).   * Wrapper to extract some Wireless Parameter out
of the driver static inl