Enumerating devices, capabilities and interfaces

CLI way

Linux exposes WiFi devices as "phy" entities. WiFi devices by itself do not offer any connectivity. Linux allows creation of network interfaces (the well-known interfaces which could be found using ip link | perl -ne '/\d+:\s+(\w+):/ && print "$1\n";') assigned to corresponding phy's. These network interfaces are in fact used for wireless communication.

To obtain a list of phy's and corresponding network interfaces use iw dev | egrep -i 'phy|Interface|type'.