You can also leave off the pipe to grep, which will report back additional details about the queried router, most of the added data reported isn’t particularly useful though, thus why we’re cleaning up the output and shortening it with grep. This command can be particularly helpful if you combine it with the ability to list all wireless networks a Mac has connected to before, particularly if you can’t remember the exact name or spelling of a specific router. In this example, the password for ‘YOUR-ROUTER” is “osxdailysecretpassword”, minus the quotations. $ security find-generic-password -ga 'YOUR-ROUTER' |grep 'password:' Hitting return and running that command string will request an administrator login (or you can prefix with sudo), which will then return the password for the given router, looking like the following: Security find-generic-password -ga 'YOUR-ROUTER' |grep 'password:' You do not need to be connected to that network to recover the password for that network, you only need to have joined it once, and saved the password for it when you connected at that time.įor example, let’s say the wireless router name is “YOUR-ROUTER”, the command would look like the following: Replace “ROUTERNAME” with the exact name of the wireless router you want to retrieve the password for. Security find-generic-password -ga 'ROUTERNAME' | grep 'password:' To get started with this trick, open the Terminal app from /Applications/Utilities/, then use the following command syntax to find and display the password for a specific wireless network: Find & Show Wi-Fi Network Passwords from the Command Line in Mac OS X You will need to know the router name of the wi-fi router password you wish to retrieve. Perhaps the easiest method is recovering forgotten wireless passwords with Ke圜hain Access in Mac OS X, but if you’re an advanced Mac user you may wish to retrieve the same data from the command line, and that’s what we’re going to demonstrate here. Fortunately, if you’re on a Mac, there are a few ways to go about finding those lost or forgotten wi-fi router login details.

Find wifi password mac os