airplane mode in wpa_supplicant

Question

I believe "airplane mode" on various applets is equivalent to nmcli radio wifi off. What is its equivalence when we use dhcpcd/wpa_supplicant? pkill wpa_supplicant?

Answer 1

NetworkManager (and its nmcli CLI command) calls a lower level API in the end. As this has nothing to do with dhcpcd and not much to do with wpa_supplicant, if you're not using NetworkManager, you can still (install the adequate package and) use as root the rfkill command.

To list the status of all available RF devices:

rfkill list

To disable all of them:

rfkill block all

To enable all of them (only if no hardware switch prevents it):

rfkill unblock all

For other options please check the man.