My Ubuntu laptops's WiFi works fine on various Wifi networks. But the list of available networks accessed from the toolbar icon of nm-applet by no longer appears. I just see the known networks. The list of hidden networks also doesn't show any new networks.

sudo iwlist scan likewise only shows known networks.

How do I get list all available networks so I can connect to one?

I am using Xubuntu 14.04

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4 Answers

Use nmcli dev wifi command. It shows the transfer rate, the signal strength and the security as well.

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To scan all networks try using the command sudo iw dev wlan0 scan | grep SSID.

You can find more info here:

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In Ubuntu 16.04 :

1. Go to /sys/class/net you can see list of folders here.
2. find wireless interface. It has wireless folder. for example in my case is wlp10 you can check it using ls wlp10. if the folder's name different use that folder's name.
3. sudo iwlist wlp1s0 scan | grep ESSID

now from here you can list all available WiFi.
source from here

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Further to what has been already answered here, I've merged a few of them and added a little flavor of my own.

As for the nmcli answer, sure, do that if you want to install more software. But if you're looking for Access Points, maybe you don't have an internet connection yet and are unable to connect to install said software. With all that said, here's my solution:

for i in $(ls /sys/class/net/ | egrep -v ^lo$); do sudo iw dev $i scan | grep SSID | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$2)) }'; done 2>/dev/null | sort -u 

Breaking it down:

for i in $(ls /sys/class/net/ | egrep -v ^lo$);

Lets have a look at all the contents of the location /sys/class/net. This will list all the network devices, but we're not really interested in the loopback interface. so we'll ignore that one

do sudo iw dev $i scan | grep SSID | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$2)) }';done

For each of the network interfaces we found above, lets do the scan to list all the SSIDs (and only the SSIDs)

2>/dev/null 

And ignore all the errors (like searching for SSIDs with ethernet interfaces).

| sort -u

And finally, If you have multiple wi-fi adapters on the system, only list each SSID once.

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