Disable bluetooth through terminal?

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Level 1

4 points

Disable bluetooth through terminal?

I manage a couple of labs through ARD, and I would like to know if it is possible to turn off bluetooth using terminal. I can turn off airport, but I've been searching for such a command with no luck.

Bonus, is there also a way to turn remove the bluetooth icon from the menu bar using terminal?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4), Managing 700 Apple devices

Posted on Oct 19, 2010 12:00 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

supriya_b

Level 1

4 points

Apr 19, 2017 3:39 AM in response to TR_Chris

Above commands worked for me.

And finally relaunching Finder fixed the issue.

I even tried disabling and enabling Airdrop , as suggested by some one in similar post.

Which did not work for me.

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Answer 2

g_wolfman

Level 4

1,984 points

Oct 24, 2010 9:14 AM in response to TR_Chris

[man networksetup|http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Refer ence/ManPages/man8/networksetup.8.html]

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Answer 3

TR_Chris Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 29, 2010 9:07 AM in response to TR_Chris

I didn't find any topic with bluetooth in it. And I don't believe the OS categorizes it as a network interface like airport...Thanks for the suggestion though.

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Answer 4

g_wolfman

Level 4

1,984 points

Oct 29, 2010 1:42 PM in response to TR_Chris

It's a network service, not an interface.

"networksetup -listallnetworkservices" should give you it's name (probably something like "Bluetooth DUN"). Similarly, I imagine disabling it would be done via one of the service-related commands, not the interface-related commands.

networksetup is the backend to the Network Preference Pane...since you can make a service inactive via the GUI, there must be an equivalent command in networksetup.

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Answer 5

TR_Chris Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 1, 2010 9:34 AM in response to TR_Chris

Thank you, that works perfectly.

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Answer 6

Nov 7, 2010 1:53 AM in response to TR_Chris

So which command worked perfectly for you?

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Answer 7

vike2000

Level 1

4 points

Jan 15, 2011 3:49 PM in response to TR_Chris

probably due to a faulty bluetooth-device i just had to do this in singe-user/safe mode (cmd-s during boot) to circumvent a kernel-panic:
+defaults write "$(find /Library/Preferences -iname ' bluetooth'|sed -Ene's/\.plist//p')" ControllerPowerState -int 0+
but feel free to use this one ;p :
*defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth ControllerPowerState -int 0*

cheers
vike

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Answer 8

Adil H.

Level 1

0 points

Jan 19, 2011 10:59 AM in response to vike2000

When I needed to remove Bluetooth support, I chose to move the kernel extension:
sudo mv /System/Library/Extensions/IOBluetooth* /somedir

This maybe more appropriate if you are trying to avoid users from using it.

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Answer 9

Jun 14, 2013 10:35 PM in response to TR_Chris

I've been looking into this myself, here's some more commands to add to the list:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ControllerPowerState

#read the current pref, returns '0' for off and '1' for on.

--

All of the following will require sudo if run from the command line:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ControllerPowerState 0

#set bluetooth pref to off

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ControllerPowerState 1

#set bluetooth pref to on

killall blued

#kill the bluetooth server process

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.blued.plist

#unload the daemon

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.blued.plist

#reload the daemon

launchctl start com.apple.blued

#restart blued daemon

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Answer 10

Oct 15, 2016 5:44 PM in response to Phil Stokes

Thank you!!!!

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Answer 11

Jan 26, 2017 8:50 AM in response to Phil Stokes

Thanks so much, very help full commands.

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