Re: iw and non-ASCII SSIDs

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

[please don't use HTML]

On Mon, 2015-06-29 at 08:17 +0000, Joerg Pommnitz wrote:
> We don't have to break compatibility. The commandline syntax of iw is
> iw [options] command
> My suggestion would be a new option "--binary-ssid" that sets a flag 
> and causes all SSID to be treated as a hex encoded binary blob:
> iw --binary-ssid dev wlan0 ibss join 0034AA 2412
> and for consistency
> iw --binary-ssid dev wlan0 connect 0034AA
> 
> Alternatively the option could be "--escaped-ssid" that would 
> activate an escape processing for the SSID as you suggested. My 
> preference is "--binary-ssid", because I'm always a little bit unsure 
> what actually arrives in the program after the shell has done its own 
> escape processing.
> 


Yeah, that seems reasonable, though perhaps easier to do as

  iw dev wlan0 ibss join --binary-ssid 0034AA 2412

since options before the command are treated as generic iw options.

Then again, if all places that use an SSID were to use a
"parse_ssid(argv[7])" function then the former could also be
implemented.

johannes