How to add the wifi and bluetooth icon to the menubar programatically (from the command line)

There is an answer over at Superuser. The last post there is what I found to work best, in a slightly different form. The 'checkbox "On"' did not work for me, but the following code did:

# This is only necessary, if AppleScripts are not yet allowed to change checkboxes
tell application "System Events" to set UI elements enabled to true
# Now change the bluetooth status
tell application "System Preferences"
    set current pane to pane id "com.apple.preferences.bluetooth"
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process "System Preferences"
            # Enabled is checkbox number 2
            if value of checkbox 2 of window "Bluetooth" is 0 then
                click checkbox 2 of window "Bluetooth"
            end if
        end tell
    end tell
    quit
end tell

You can execute this script using osascript.

Update: I now changed the script to just enable Bluetooth. No toggling anymore.

Blueutil is a neat little command line tool to do this. It's free and comes with the source code. If you have homebrew installed, you can install it via brew install blueutil.

Usage:

Print bluetooth status
blueutil

Switch bluetooth on
blueutil --power 1 or blueutil -p 1

Switch bluetooth off
blueutil --power 0 or blueutil -p 0

Works just fine on a Macbook Pro running Lion (10.7.3) and Mac mini running Snow Leopard (10.6.8). You will get some errors if you switch off the bluetooth whilst a magic mouse is connected, it still works though :)