Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Turn Bluetooth On and Off from Command Line on macOS

By  on  
bluetooth

Bluetooth has been a revelation in wireless technology: wireless mice, headphones, streaming devices, and a variety of home and office environments.  It goes without saying that wireless peripherals are so much easier to manage than wired counterparts, especially mice, that I usually have my MacBook's bluetooth turned on.

There are times, however, that I move my laptop away from the mouse (OK, I admit:  the kitchen) where the bluetooth connection is still in range but with the mouse still connected, I can't use my laptop's touchpad, leaving me to only use my keyboard which is an annoyance.  That led me to finding blueutil, a command line utility for macOS that lets me turn Bluetooth on and off with one command!

Start by installing blueutil with HomeBrew:

brew install blueutil

The -p flag is a switch for turning bluetooth on and off:

# Turn bluetooth off
blueutil -p 0

# Turn bluetooth on
blueutil -p 1

This utility will be so helpful as I move around my house.  Since I can't use my touchpad during these situations, I can't turn Bluetooth off from the command bar, so a simple command like this is exactly what I need!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Patrick K

    Thanks for sharing this! I was trying to find an easier way to toggle Bluetooth and I kept finding articles about AppleScript, but this is way easier for people familiar with the command line.

  2. Ahmed Hossein

    Thank you! I just came across this and it was a life-saver.

    I created a small “bluetoggle.sh” to toggle the switch: ON if it was OFF, OFF if it was ON. I then used iCanHazShortcut to map the script to [^B] for ease of access.

    #!/bin/zsh

if [ blueutil -p |grep 1 = "1" 2>/dev/null 2>/dev/null ]; then blueutil -p 0; else blueutil -p 1; fi
  3. Ahmed Hossein

    The code above was messed up by the interpreter (symbol ` is not accepted it seems). I put here the final code of my 1-line bluetoggle.sh

    https://pastebin.com/YssdgD5Z

  4. Ahmed Hossein

    This can be turned into a toggle command using:

    #!/bin/bash
blueutil -p | grep 1 && blueutil -p 0 || blueutil -p 1
  5. Sean Beeg

    Thanks for this. Bluetooth has been crashing on my mac every so often, so a quick brew install and 2 aliases and I’m in business.

  6. Matt D

    Here is how I control my bluetooth from ZSH.

    bt () {
	if [ -n $1 ]
	then
		echo $1
		export btArg=$(echo $1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]') 
		echo $btArg
		case $btArg in
			(on) echo "Turning on BlueTooth" >> /tmp/bt.log
				blueutil --power 1 | tee /tmp/bt.log ;;
			(off) echo "Turning off BlueTooth" >> /tmp/bt.log
				blueutil --power 0 | tee /tmp/bt.log ;;
			(stat*) echo "Checking BlueTooth state" >> /tmp/bt.log
				export BT=$(blueutil -p | tee /tmp/bt.log) 
				case $BT in
					(0) echo "BlueTooth is powered off"
						blueutil --connected ;;
					(1) echo "BlueTooth is powered on"
						blueutil --connected ;;
					(*) echo "BlueTooth in unknown state"
						blueutil --connected ;;
				esac ;;
			(*) echo -n "Unknown input" ;;
		esac
	else
		echo -n "Need input"
	fi
}

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!