Your computer is connected to a Wi-Fi network but you do not remember the password that you had earlier used to connect to this particular WiFi network. Maybe you forgot the password or maybe the network administrator entered it directly without revealing the actual password to you.
You would now like to connect a second device, like your mobile phone, to the same WiFi network but how do you find out the password? You can either send a password request to the WiFi admin or you can open the command prompt on your computer and retrieve the saved password in one easy step.
Find the Wi-Fi Password on Windows
Follow the steps given below to see the password of the Wi-Fi network through which you have connected:
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- Run the Command Prompt as an administrator.
- Type the command shown below and hit the enter button, replace the name Patelsingh with the name of your wireless SSID which is the name of the Wi-Fi network through which you have connected.
netsh wlan show profile name=Patelsingh key=clear
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- The output of this command will show the Wi-Fi password. You will find the password in the plain text corresponding to Key Content under security settings.
- If you want only to see the password and not the other information then please run the below command.
netsh wlan show profile name=Patelsingh key=clear | findstr Key
Find the Wi-Fi Password on Mac OS X
Mac OS X uses Keychain to store the configuration details of the WiFi network and we can use the BSD command “security” to query anything stored inside Keychain, including the Wi-Fi password. You can find the Wi-Fi password easily as shown in the below steps:
- Open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type terminal to open the Terminal window
Open terminal window on Mac OS X
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- At the command line, type the command shown below, replace Patelsingh with your WiFi name and hit enter button.
security find-generic-password -wa Patelsingh
- It will ask for your Mac username and password to access the OS X keychain. Enter the username and password and click on the allow button.
- Now it will show your and the Wi-FI network’s password on the screen in plain text.
