CHIO(1) BSD General Commands Manual CHIO(1) NAME chio — medium changer control utility SYNOPSIS chio [-f changer] command [-] arg1 arg2 [arg3 [...]] DESCRIPTION The chio utility is used to control the operation of medium changers, such as those found in tape and optical disk jukeboxes. The options are as follows: -f changer Use the device changer rather than the default device /dev/ch0. The default changer may be overridden by setting the environment variable CHANGER to the desired changer device. A medium changer apparatus is made up of elements. There are five ele‐ ment types: picker (medium transport), slot (storage), portal (import/export), drive (data transfer), and voltag (select by volume identifier). The voltag pseudo-element type allows the selection of tapes by their volume tag (typically a barcode on the tape). In this command description, the shorthand ET will be used to represent an element type, and EU will be used to represent an element unit. For example, to represent the first robotic arm in the changer, the ET would be “picker” and the EU would be “0”. SUPPORTED COMMANDS move [inv] Move the media unit from to . If the optional modifier inv is specified, the media unit will be inverted before insertion. exchange [ ] [inv1] [inv2] Perform a media unit exchange operation. The media unit in is moved to and the media unit previously in is moved to . In the case of a simple exchange, is omitted and the values are used in their place. The optional modifiers inv1 and inv2 spec‐ ify whether the media units are to be inverted before insertion into and respectively. Note that not all medium changers support the exchange operation; the changer must have multiple free pickers or emulate multiple free pickers with transient storage. return Return the media unit to its source element. This command will query the status of the specified media unit, and will move it to the element specified in its source attribute. This is a conve‐ nient way to return media from a drive or portal to its previous element in the changer. position [inv] Position the picker in front of the element described by . If the optional modifier inv is specified, the media unit will be inverted before insertion. Note that not all changers behave as expected when issued this command. params Report the number of slots, drives, pickers, and portals in the changer, and which picker unit the changer is currently config‐ ured to use. getpicker Report which picker unit the changer is currently configured to use. setpicker Configure the changer to use picker . ielem [] Perform an INITIALIZE ELEMENT STATUS operation on the changer. The optional parameter may be given to specify a time‐ out in seconds for the operations. This may be used if the oper‐ ation takes unusually long because of buggy firmware or the like. voltag [-fca] [