How to Retrieve WiFi Password on Windows

By  on  

Remembering the WiFi password when on a guest network is never easy. Even worse is when it's no longer posted and someone else is asking you for it. Luckily there's a built in Windows command to recover the password of a given WiFi network.

The Shell Code

Open cmd and execute the following command:

netsh wlan show profile name="David Walsh's Network" key=clear

The result of the command, assuming the network is found, is a long text output with a variety of information about the network. To get the see the password for the network, look under the "Security settings" heading which will look like this:

Security settings
-----------------
    Authentication         : WPA2-Personal
    Cipher                 : CCMP
    Authentication         : WPA2-Personal
    Cipher                 : GCMP
    Security key           : Present
    Key Content            : **THE_PLAIN_TEXT_PASSWORD**

As with any complicated command line format, it's best to create an alias so that you don't need to remember the full string!

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS :target

    One interesting CSS pseudo selector is :target.  The target pseudo selector provides styling capabilities for an element whose ID matches the window location's hash.  Let's have a quick look at how the CSS target pseudo selector works! The HTML Assume there are any number of HTML elements with...

  • By
    Check All/None Checkboxes Using MooTools

    There's nothing worse than having to click every checkbox in a list. Why not allow users to click one item and every checkbox becomes checked? Here's how to do just that with MooTools 1.2. The XHTML Note the image with the ucuc ID -- that...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!