To facilitate upgrades and ease maintenance, your application’s installation process creates a very specific directory hierarchy under the administration user ID of splsys (by default). The structure holds all the code, system products, scripts and temporary files that are created by the product during installation and operation.

There are two different directory structures that the product application uses:

Within each of the structures, there is a mount point and a subdirectory for each environment <environment> installed on the machine. The base mount point <SPLDIR> contains the environment directories that hold all the application software for each particular environment. The application output mount point <SPLDIROUT> contains the environment directories that hold temporary files (such as the output batch) as well as batch log files. The default <SPLDIR> directory is /spl and the default <SPLDIROUT> directory is /spl/sploutput.

When a user logs on to an environment of the application, either using the browser-based interface, or directly on UNIX/Linux, the environment is set up (that is, environment variables, and so on) to point to the appropriate directory structure under the mount point. The environment variable that points to an environment directory under <SPLDIR> is $SPLEBASE. The environment variable that points to an environment directory under <SPLDIROUT> is $SPLOUTPUT. The SPLEBASE and SPLOUTPUT environment variables are two of the standard environment variables used by the utilities provided with the product and runtime.

The actual location for the mount points can differ per environment if you want. This is handy if you need to vary the location because you do not have enough space for all your non-production environments. Typically the number of environments during an implementation varies according to the level of access and desired amount of testing and training. The only restriction is that there can only be one location for SPLEBASE and SPLOUTPUT per environment.