Hi,

I am fairly new to commandline in shell but have been learning a fair bit already. One problem that's been bothering me though is how to connect to my access point through my wlan0 via the command line. How do I go about establishing that connection?

You haven't provided a lot of details. You can control a wireless device directly with "iwconfig". This program is similar to ifconfig, but you can also set the channel, ssid, etal. For wireless encryption, wpa_supplicant is used.

Normally the information needed for these two programs are contained in the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 file, including the PSK. Editing the file with the correct values and running "ifup-wlan0" will connect you to your AP.

Your system may use a different location for the ifcfg-<device> files. Maybe /etc/sysconfig/networking/ for example.

On some systems, a script in /etc/ somewhere will contain iwconfig & ifconfig commands when you boot and the config file may not be used.

These programs, and even the config files have their own manpages. "man ifcfg" for example will provide information on what the config file contains.

All I want to be able to do is establish a connection with an AP via commandline rather than through a Wireless Assistant GUI. I guess it is not that simple via commandline and there is no one-line command that will just connect as I am expecting. I guess I need to search and read up on how NIC connect to AP's to better understand the process.

As jschiwal says, you "haven't provided a lot of details".

Please tell us your distro, or even better, edit your LQ profile (at the left, see mine? The link is to the right - under "My LQ") so it tells us, as different distros do networking completely differently from the command line.
It's usually very simple, and I do it all the time with just a one-line command, but we need to know your distro (Eg Ubuntu 8.04, or whatever, NOT just "lunux 5" (sic)) to be able to help you help yourself.

Please read this: http://www.linuxsilo.net/docs/smart-questions_en.html (no offence intended).

Do you? I have been using Linux for years now and I still haven't figured out how, regardless of the distro. By the way, in my case that's Opensuse 11, although iwconfig, networkmanager and such commands aren't distro-specific at all... Anyway, I would really appreciate it if you could tell me your one-line command (whatever distro you're using). Thanks.

Then you probably need to start reading here:
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...ess_Networking

Note that the commands are essentially the same across distros, but the configuration files have two systems / locations - the Fedora / RedHat system and the Debian / Ubuntu system. I think Suse follows the former, but you'll soon find out.

Once the configuration files are correct, the one-liner to use (as root) is

ifup name_of_wireless_interface eg