Linux Hint Posted March 16 Share Posted March 16 Keeping the WiFi devices disabled when you don’t need them will save the battery life of your device. It also improves the security as your Linux system won’t be able to connect to open the WiFi networks nearby. Opennig the WiFi networks don’t require a password to connect to and the devices often connect to those open WiFi networks automatically when no known/saved WiFi networks are available nearby. Some hackers keep their WiFi network open so that they can perform a man-in-the-middle attack on you and they can steal a sensitive information by monitoring the traffic. So, unknown open WiFi networks are unsafe and should be avoided at all costs. In this article, we will show you how to enable or disable the WiFi network devices from the command line on modern Linux distributions that use the NetworkManager to manage the network devices. This article should work on the following listed Linux distributions and other Linux distributions (not listed) that use the NetworkManager to manage the networks and have the “nmcli” command-line tool available. Ubuntu Debian Linux Mint Elementary OS Fedora RHEL CentOS Stream AlmaLinux Rocky Linux openSUSE SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Oracle Linux Topic of Contents: Checking If the WiFi Is Enabled/Disabled from the Command Line on Linux Using Nmcli Disabling the WiFi from the Command Line on Linux Using Nmcli Enabling the WiFi from the Command Line on Linux Using Nmcli Conclusion Checking If the WiFi Is Enabled/Disabled from the Command Line on Linux Using Nmcli You can check the current status (enabled/disabled) of your WiFi device from the command line on Linux as follows: $ sudo nmcli radio wifi As you can see, the WiFi devices are enabled in our case. Disabling the WiFi from the Command Line on Linux Using Nmcli If you want to disable the WiFi devices of your Linux system, run the following command: $ sudo nmcli radio wifi off As you can see, the WiFi devices are disabled. $ sudo nmcli radio wifi Enabling the WiFi from the Command Line on Linux Using Nmcli To enable the WiFi devices on your Linux system, run the following command: $ sudo nmcli radio wifi on As you can see, the WiFi devices are enabled. $ sudo nmcli radio wifi Conclusion In this article, we showed you how to check if the WiFi devices are disabled/enabled on your Linux system from the command line using the “nmcli” NetworkManager management tool. We also showed you how to enable/disable the WiFi devices on your Linux system from the command line using “nmcli”. Disabling the WiFi devices when you don’t need them improves battery life and security. View the full article Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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