I am looking for a way to check to see if the bluetooth is enabled or disabled on my laptop via the terminal. Is there a command that I can use to find this information

6 Answers

In addition to checking for the service you can use the command

hcitool dev

that will return all devices turned on.

More information with `hciconfig -a`

hciconfig -a provides way more information, including the Bluetooth version.

$ hciconfig -a
hci0: Type: Primary Bus: USB BD Address: 00:1A:7D:DC:70:13 ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8 UP RUNNING PSCAN RX bytes:1013 acl:0 sco:0 events:60 errors:0 TX bytes:4890 acl:0 sco:0 commands:60 errors:0 Features: 0xff 0xff 0x8f 0xfe 0xdb 0xff 0x5b 0x87 Packet type: DM1 DM3 DM5 DH1 DH3 DH5 HV1 HV2 HV3 Link policy: RSWITCH HOLD SNIFF PARK Link mode: SLAVE ACCEPT Name: 'hostname' Class: 0x1c0104 Service Classes: Rendering, Capturing, Object Transfer Device Class: Computer, Desktop workstation HCI Version: 4.0 (0x6) Revision: 0x22bb LMP Version: 4.0 (0x6) Subversion: 0x22bb Manufacturer: Cambridge Silicon Radio (10)

Just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, You can run this command to see the status of bluetooth

sudo service bluetooth status

after you enter your password, you should see something like

bluetooth is running

An alternative is to use the command hciconfig. It will list clearly the interfaces, and you will see by the marker "RUNNING" or "DOWN" what is their current status.

rfkill will show you a list of network devices and if they are on or off.

With BlueZ: Using bluetoothctl (interactive bluetooth control tool), which gives you a terminal with show and these other commands:

[bluetooth]# help
Menu main:
Available commands:
-------------------
advertise Advertise Options Submenu
scan Scan Options Submenu
gatt Generic Attribute Submenu
list List available controllers
show [ctrl] Controller information
select <ctrl> Select default controller
devices List available devices
paired-devices List paired devices
system-alias <name> Set controller alias
reset-alias Reset controller alias
power <on/off> Set controller power
pairable <on/off> Set controller pairable mode
discoverable <on/off> Set controller discoverable mode
discoverable-timeout [value] Set discoverable timeout
agent <on/off/capability> Enable/disable agent with given capability
default-agent Set agent as the default one
advertise <on/off/type> Enable/disable advertising with given type
set-alias <alias> Set device alias
scan <on/off> Scan for devices
info [dev] Device information
pair [dev] Pair with device
trust [dev] Trust device
untrust [dev] Untrust device
block [dev] Block device
unblock [dev] Unblock device
remove <dev> Remove device
connect <dev> Connect device
disconnect [dev] Disconnect device
menu <name> Select submenu
version Display version
quit Quit program
exit Quit program
help Display help about this program
export Print environment variables

With bluez-tools: bt-* (apropos bt-) like bt-device, a bluetooth device manager.