MacOS – How to control Bluetooth wireless radio from the command line

bluetoothcommand linemacossnow leopardterminal

This question is almost the same as my previous question, but with one major difference; I want to turn on/off Bluetooth from the command line (bash or similar), NOT from AppleScript – the answers for this I saw on superuser all used AppleScript.

I would guess that networksetup might be useful but have no idea what interface(s) to interact with – I would like an answer including a complete command I can run (and understand) – if device model matters, it's Snow Leopard on MacBook2,1 to MacBook7,1, except MacBook5,1, and if you can only do for 6,1 and 7,1 that's fine.

Best Answer

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 :)

Related Solutions

Turn on bluetooth via terminal/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.

MacOS – How to control AirPort wireless radio from the command line

See OSX Daily - Enable and Disable AirPort Wireless from the Command Line in Mac OS X. Quote:

Turn Airport Off via Command Line
networksetup -setairportpower airport off

Turn Airport On via Command Line
networksetup -setairportpower airport on

You won’t see any confirmation in the Terminal that the command succeeded or failed, but if you watch the AirPort menu icon you will see the bars disappear indicating the wireless interface is turned off, or reappear indicating that wireless is activated again.

NOTE: In OS X Lion, use the hardware name above instead of airport,
e.g. networksetup -setairportpower en1 off.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Turn on bluetooth via terminal/command line

MacOS – How to control AirPort wireless radio from the command line

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