"rfkill list" stopped working
 

Yesterday “rfkill list” showed both my wired and wireless networks in Terminal, but today it shows nothing and just goes to next Terminal prompt. The only change was installing a USB driver for Canon TS6020 printer.

Alternate question: How else can I show whether wireless is hard blocked?

to see if it is still there, or
to seek it out, if it is on your system find will show it.
is another searching method. Sometimes needs its database updated.

BW-userx,

Tried both, same result, no list.

If these items have been disabled in hardware, I do not believe they will show up in the rfkill list.

rtmistler,

I know "eth0" is not blocked as I used it to download Canon driver. And yesterday, when WiFi [wlan0] had a hard block, this is how I found that and corrected the issue (i.e. it showed in list). Today list is blank although only "Wired" connection shows in "Network Connections" and both appear in "Network Settings".

Did you reboot and try again? Sometimes the modules / drivers get unloaded or out of whack. Especially not so great wifi drivers.

Some laptops have a hardware kill switch which might be triggered. And otherwise prevent it from showing up in rfkill. Although I haven't had one of those in a long time. Fn + Special Button when I did, and off by default if you ran the battery dead or physically removed the battery in the case of that laptop. Or other oddities like restoring defaults to the bios. Back then Fn + special button and load ndiswrapper and the light under said button would be on when it worked. Probably not your issue, but one I had long ago.

Are you sure you're remembering correctly? rfkill only shows wireless networking on my laptop. I believe the 'rf' in rfkill stands for 'radio frequency'.

if you got network up and running and a way out, try installing rfkill and see what your system tells you.