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.

2

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

4

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.