[Internal] New IDL 8.x directory structure
Help Article Update 2
Anonym
Note: This is only valid for IDL 8.0 and IDL 8.1. Not valid for IDL 8.2.
The new directory restructure is designed to better position all ITT VIS products and give more visibility to all products across all platforms.
This re-design has the potential of changing the behaviour of OS shell scripts and environment variables that were created for previous versions of IDL (i.e. before 8.x).
The generic "idl" link on Unix platforms is still present, but just one directory level lower.
Discussion
Starting with the IDL 8.0 and continuing with future releases, there is a new directory structure where IDL lives. IDL 8.x now is located in the following default directory:
/usr/local/itt/idl/idl8x/
where idl8x refers to, for example, idl80, or idl81, etc.
This is by design. It was intended to better position all ITT VIS products and give more visibility to all products across all platforms. The generic "idl" link on Unix platforms is still present, but just one directory level lower:
ls -l /usr/local/itt/idl/
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 5 Jul 8 15:43 idl -> idl80
drwxr-xr-x. 10 100 users 4096 Jul 8 15:41 idl80
The symbolic link that was used in the past versions of IDL was located, for example, in:
/usr/local/itt/idl
and pointing to:
/usr/local/itt/idl -> idl71
has been replaced by the directory mentioned above (/usr/local/itt/idl/). Therefore, users that are using older shell scripts, i.e. .bashrc for example, will find that the sourcing of the idl_setup.bash will fail, with the following message:
bash: /usr/local/itt/idl/bin/idl_setup.bash: No such file or directory
This happens because inside the .bashrc the following line was created by previous versions of IDL:
. /usr/local/itt/idl/bin/idl_setup.bash
Therefore, if a user expects to have the latest version of IDL sourced, he/she will need to modify the .bashrc script in the following way:
. /usr/local/itt/idl/idl/bin/idl_setup.bash
(note the addition of another directory called "idl" before the symbolic link).