dmenu_wifi
dmenu is super cool. I'm
pretty comfortable saying it's my favorite piece of software. It takes
a list of lines from stdin, creates a menu out of them,
and writes the user's selection to stdout. You can use it
to do basically anything.
In this case, I was looking for a simple
way to connect to wi-fi networks without NetworkManager,
which, for whatever reason, simply did not work on my machine when I
was setting it up. This script is really just a list of the commands I
would run to connect manually with wpa_supplicant.
I've tried to keep it as narrowly POSIX as possible, given
the obvious constraint that it has to use commands specific
to wi-fi hardware, and, of course, dmenu (which requires the password
patch to work properly with this script). The packages it requires
are pretty common and usually ship standard (although I don't think
iw comes standard on Arch).
Probably my biggest issue with it is that a lot of the wi-fi commands have
to be run as root. If there's a clean fix for this using a udev rule or
something like that, I haven't found it, so I just carve out a password
exception for it in /etc/sudoers so I can bind it to a key.