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Is there a way to see the history of connections to a specific wifi network in the last couple of months.

The idea is to focus on one particular SSID and on which days my laptop connected to that network over a period of time.

Is this logged or available for review after the fact?

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    History as in which SSIDs were used at any point in time, or just a list of SSIDs that have ever been used on the Mac?
    – Jesse P.
    Dec 14, 2018 at 15:58
  • @JesseP. Yeah. Actually interested in one particular SSID and on which days my laptop connected to that network over a period of time.
    – Lumiere
    Dec 14, 2018 at 20:30
  • What exactly are you looking to accomplish with this info? Connecting to an SSID is not the same as connecting to a network; you can authenticate to an AP without actually being allowed on a network.
    – Allan
    Dec 20, 2018 at 18:25

2 Answers 2

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Specific WiFi network connection history in OSX

Try using the following command in Terminal

log show --predicate '(processImagePath contains "configd") && (eventMessage contains "en0: SSID {enter your SSID name} ")' --style syslog --last 1d

Change last 1d (1 day to any days you want to look)

It will list all Dates and Time when your Mac was connected to specified SSID (network name)

This is a sample from my Mac looking at 3 days

enter image description here

More about WiFi networks on your Mac..

If you have the option "Remember Networks" enabled, all Networks that you joined at one time will be there, even Years back.

all WiFi

You can also find the last log in information for each Network in your Keychain.

key chain

However, that does not tells you specific activity per Network, only the last log in time.

Depending what are you looking for you can find the detailed WiFi logs in /private/var/log/

Also you can use following command to show you the history (Years) for all Networks your Mac connected.

defaults read /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences |grep LastConnected -A 7

EXAMPLE

History

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    This is a nice way to see one data point and illustrates why the history isn’t preserved over time for multiple connections to one SSID. +1 for super detail and getting closer to a solution
    – bmike ♦
    Dec 20, 2018 at 5:16
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No, Apple doesn’t log or present this in a quick and easy way to retrieve - especially over months of time.

However all is not lost, there is an amazing app that logs WiFi quite well.

I’m sure someone could script up a solution as well, but I’ve been very satisfied with this author’s various WiFi tools and blogs and it logs the data you need in a super clean and useful manner.

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  • I think I found it log show --predicate '(processImagePath contains "configd") && (eventMessage contains "en0: SSID {enteryours} ")' --style syslog --last 1d change the 1d to more days
    – Ruskes
    Dec 20, 2018 at 7:49
  • @Buscar웃 That's very promising - a unified log search that's super useful. I'm seeing on Mojave that you get lots of entries but I could see making a tool to dump or process those log entries into changes in SSID or know that when the message was logged there was a connection. I'll report back, initially I'm seeing on average a log message an hour for a Mac that's lightly used and has a wired ethernet connection as well.
    – bmike ♦
    Dec 20, 2018 at 12:27

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