Scripting wpa_supplicant for multi-profile selection

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

Hi all. So, first of all my apologies for the noob question. I've searched around for a way to make use of bash arrays to perform what I need, but I'm struggling to understand which method would be better.

So, I'm looking to get a bit more comfortable with scripting, hoping to use wpa_supplicant as an ideal usecase. I know it can handle multiple wpa passphrase profiles by itself just fine, but figured I'd take this opprutunity to make my own multi-profile script.

The aim is to have a basic script which contains references to the various wpa passphrase configs I have setup, and have it provide a list of available profiles to shell, which I can select as required.

What I have in mind, is to declare a base variable for the wpa_suppplicant and arguments, then havethe script choose from an array which wpa passphrase to use. Below are the full strings I'm aiming to use, but I imagine this can be simplified:

#Home
wpa_Home="wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_Home.conf -i wlp1s0"
#Anne
wpa_Anne="wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_Anne.conf -i wlp1s0"
#Emilia
wpa_Emilia="wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_Emilia.conf -i wlp1s0"

I'd imagine it would make more sense to declare the wpa_supplicant paramater with arguments, and have a means of choosing from the available wpa passphrase configs. Could I ask one of you wonderful peeps if you have some ideas on how to achieve this? Cheers!

2

Some progress. Managed to create a basic indexed array and have it print all contents to shell per following:

#!/bin/bash
# WPA Profiles

#Home
wpa_Profile[0]="wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_Home.conf -i wlp1s0"
#Anne
wpa_Profile[1]="wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_Anne.conf -i wlp1s0"
#Emilia
wpa_Profile[2]="wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_Emilia.conf -i wlp1s0"

for i in "${wpa_Profile[*]}"; do echo "$i"; done

What I'm stuck with now is finding away to interactively read from shell and either output or execute a specific index. As mentioed earlier, I guess the array should contain only references to the wpa passphrase, which can then be joined to a standard wpa_supplicant + arguments...one step at a time though I s'pose :p.