Connect to a Bluetooth device via Terminal

I managed to do so via bluez-tools:

sudo apt-get install bluez-tools

List of devices to get the MAC address of my device:

bt-device -l

and successfully connect to it:

bt-audio -c 01:02:03:04:05:06

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Keep in mind that the bt-audio feature has been reimplemented probably some time in 2016, so bt-audio is likely no longer available as such.

To do it with the built-in utils, you can follow this slightly more manual process using bluetoothctl.

hcitool scan  # to get the MAC address of your device
bluetoothctl
agent on
scan on  # wait for your device's address to show up here
scan off
trust MAC_ADDRESS
pair MAC_ADDRRESS
connect MAC_ADDRESS

The posts in this Github issue suggest a way to script it, but that did not work for me since I needed to manually wait for the scan to yield results.

I did to sudo apt-get install bluez-tools, because I did use it at some point.

After being able to find the device from hcitool scan, I ran bluez-simple-agent hci0 X where X is the mac address of the device I was adding. This created the connection to the device.

Then I ran hciconfig scan and it seems to have automatically started the connection.