Bluetooth CL has been designed to provide a quick and effective way of detecting Bluetooth devices on computer systems running Windows that support Bluetooth. It is a command line software that detects Bluetooth devices and displays its MAC address, name, major and minor device type and optionally the company name of the device.

The command line tool does not come with a lot of options unlike other Nirsoft applications. It can be executed by simply launching BluetoothCL.exe without parameters. The results are then displayed in the command line window. It is possible to dump the results in a text file by simply appending > bluetooth.txt (or whatever you want to name the text file) after the file name.

The only other parameter that is available is the timeout parameter that defines the timeout for the Bluetooth scanning process. Appending -timeout xx where xx is the time in seconds will do the trick. To dump a list of all Bluetooth devices in the file blue.txt with a timeout of 20 seconds one would issue the following command:

BluetoothCL.exe -timeout 20 > blue.txt

The company name of the device cannot be detected unless the text document oui.txt is downloaded from another website and put in the same directory as the BluetoothCL executable.

The Bluetooth software will display information like the device name, Bluetooth address, major and minor device type plus the first and last detection time. The program can either notify the user by displaying a balloon tip in the Windows system tray or by playing a sound. Interesting for some users is the surveillance opportunity that arises as the first and last detection time are recorded. An example would be to know when family members or neighbors arrived or left.

Bluetooth View can try to connect to any detected Bluetooth device. This can be used to test the connection. No data will be transferred however and the connection will be closed automatically afterwards. The program requires a Bluetooth dongle and either Windows XP or Windows Vista. The program probably works fine under Windows 7 as well. Bluetooth View is an excellent software program for detecting Bluetooth devices.