I don’t generally forget the password for Wi-Fi networks I use, mainly because I use 1Password to store all secrets. But, I ran across the ability to retrieve the password, in plain text, from the OS X Keychain of an SSID I’ve previously connected with. Not a huge amount of utility to this but it’s interesting the capability exists.

In the command below I read the the keychain and hone-in on just the password portion. Replace <SSID_NAME> with the name of of a valid SSID you’ve connected with in the past. Keep in mind case sensitivity matters. You can leave off | grep password and retrieve the whole item too. This command requires authentication so you’ll be asked to enter your username and password.

security find-generic-password -ga <SSID_NAME> | grep password

There’s lots more the security program can do. Read the man pages and you’ll see a list of available commands such as: create-keypair, add-generic-password, list-keychains.