How to Find the Wi-Fi Password Using CMD in Windows

If you forgot your Wi-Fi password, the command prompt may save you some time if you have connected your windows device to the network. It is normal to forget passwords and resetting the Wifi password is too much hustle than is needed. This is because resetting the password means having to reconnect all the other devices to the network again with the new password. It is a pain especially if you have many devices.

To avoid all that, we can utilize the netsh command to see the wifi password. This is possible because Windows keeps a record of all the networks that have ever been used on the windows device. They do this to avoid re-entering the password again every single time we want to connect to the same network. Now that that is out of the way, let's see how to find the Wi-Fi password using the command prompt.

Viewing Wireless Network Profiles.

1. Start by opening the Command Prompt with administration privileges.

   • You can do this by Clicking on the windows start menu icon on the far left of the taskbar.
   • Type "cmd" in the search box and right-click on Command Prompt in the search results. This should open a context menu.
   • Select Run as administrator
   • If prompted by the User Account Control (UAC) dialogue box, Click "Yes" to confirm.

2. To list all the stored WLAN profiles, type the following command.

   netsh wlan show profiles
   

   You should get an output similar to the one below. Showing all the networks the device has been connected to.

   

   From this listing, you should be able to see the name of your Wifi network.

3. You can view more information about a particular wireless network by specifying the name using the netsh command. In this example, I will choose the "HUAWEI Y5 lite" network. Here is the command

netsh wlan show profile name="Huawei Y5 lite"

Here is the output:

As you can see, specifying the name of the network gives you a lot more useful information about the network. However, You still can't see the password of the network. To see the wifi password, we use the "key=clear" parameter. Let's how it looks like.

Viewing Wireless Network Password

4. Here is the command that shows the password of the wireless network you choose.

   netsh wlan show profile name="HUAWEI Y5 lite" key=clear
   

   Here is the output:

   

   As you can see, by adding the key=clear parameter to the netshcommand, we get an extra info with the name Key Contentunder the Security settings. This Key Content holds the password to the wifi network.

Conclusion

That is all there is to finding the wifi password using the command prompt. Now that you have the password to your wireless network, you can avoid having to reset the password and giving yourself some extra work.

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GeekBitsCaptain Salem