ok i have seen this script and its similar to what i want to do except i want to select networks by signal strength and limited to a set of essid's where i work uses 5 different essids and i want to select based on strength. i have been trying to grep out the signal strength from iwlist and write the essid and strength to a table then use the table to select the highest signal however that has proved dificult as im not very good with grep and tables yet.

i have googled till my fingers have bled and cant seem to find any thing.

once i can select the network by signal strength i all ready have a script to connect on boot that can be modified very easily

EDIT: im trying to grab out the essids with the following
if i can get that working ill do the same with signal strength

Where it says "grep 'essid:'", change that to the text that is immediately before the signal strength.

There are quite a few grep, sed and awk manuals out there (check out TLDP - The Linux Documentation Project).

Also, you need to tell us more: what is happening, what isn't happening, what should be happening, some sample output would be nice (of course, with some of the sensitive information blanked out).

right now its in the infant stages of just getting the variables i drive a truck and only realy have time to work on it when i get home so it will be a little while before i get any thing useful that i can post.

so my plan is to grep out the essid and signal strength sort by strength then connect with the wifi settings for that network. not to hard just need the time to get every thing working. thanks for the tip on grep and the point to the ldp

Oh - you're very welcome!