About rfkill

rfkill is a small userspace tool to query the state of the rfkill switches, buttons and subsystem interfaces. Some devices come with a hard switch that lets you kill different types of RF radios: 802.11 / Bluetooth / NFC / UWB / WAN / WIMAX / FM. Some times these buttons may kill more than one RF type. The Linux kernel rfkill subsystem exposes these hardware buttons and lets userspace query its status and set its status through a /dev/rfkill. Given that at times some RF devices do not have hardware rfkill buttons rfkill the Linux kernel also exposes software rfkill capabilities that allows userspace to mimic a hardware rfkill event and turn on or off RF.

Getting rfkill

Release tarballs of rfkill are available from http://kernel.org/pub/software/network/rfkill/.

Alternatively, you can download rfkill from git: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/jberg/rfkill.git.

Help

Just enter:

rfkill help

on your command line and it will print out the commands it supports.

Printing the current rfkill status

rfkill list

Listening to events

Just use

rfkill event

Setting/clearing a soft block

Use

rfkill list

to get the rfkill index, then use

rfkill block <index>|<type>

or

rfkill unblock <index>|<type>