Prefer networksetup and skip root runs

[gileswells]

Primarily I wanted to incorporate @amartignoni's simplification through networksetup over use of a private API and implement a fix for issue #28 so that I had a one stop branch that would do what I needed.

This covers both scenarios.

Closes #29

[smilinggoat]

Turns out this breaks support for SSIDs with spaces in the name. It only matches the final " lastword".

[KuuDS]

fix for SSIDs with spaces

networksetup -listallhardwareports | awk '/Wi-Fi/{getline; print $2}' | xargs networksetup -getairportnetwork | sed 's/[^:]*: //'

[smilinggoat]

fix for SSIDs with spaces

networksetup -listallhardwareports | awk '/Wi-Fi/{getline; print $2}' | xargs networksetup -getairportnetwork | sed 's/[^:]*: //'

That worked for me. Thanks!

[fujimite]

fix for SSIDs with spaces

networksetup -listallhardwareports | awk '/Wi-Fi/{getline; print $2}' | xargs networksetup -getairportnetwork | sed 's/[^:]*: //'

Unfortunately this is broken as of MacOS 15.0. And I haven't been able to find any way to fix it without sudo, as every non-sudo command I've found lists the SSID as "<redacted>"

[CalumnShearer]

Try system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | grep -A2 'Status: Connected' | tail -n1 | sed 's/:$//' | xargs

[pbernicchi]

I know this PR is still technically open so I'll mention that I have been trying to find a repeatable, non-root way to retrieve the active SSID (without introducing 2-3 seconds of latency as system_profiler runs - which, for me is still redacting as of macOS 26.3).

I've been using locationchanger for many years. I will likely wind up forking this project and updating the prep and script that has restored full functionality for me. I use it for automatically changing proxy settings tied to work/home locations. If it looks like this project has aged out, I will post the fork here and as a reply to the open Issue.

[kkovaletp]

As this PR came up in my inbox, I'd like to share the working and faster solution I currently use in this script on MacOS 26.2 to get the active SSID:

ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep ' SSID' | awk '{print $3}'

Hope that it is useful for you too.

[pbernicchi]

Hi,

Yep - that's where I landed as well, but I used

ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep ' SSID' | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'

Where the additional awk arguments account for SSIDs with spaces like "John's iPhone," etc.

I've submitted PR #33 on this project but I have forked the patched script to my own repo at https://github.com/pbernicchi/locationchanger until a decision can be made by the original author on long-term maintenance. Happy to take it on as a transfer or standalone.