Add the -t option and it will tell you where it's put the output
files.

thought it's strange because normally with java a dir named
"playhtml" is only a relative path

it has been somehow translated internally to /playhtml  (i'm running
under MaacOS X the latest)

also i wanted to try-out the next axample "The Bible" but was
unable to find the input nt.xml.

The documentation at

http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/samples/bible.html

yes i was following a locl version of this page, normally the file
nt.xml would have to be in :

~/work/XSLT2/saxon-resources8-9/samples/data%> ls
books.dtd       books.xml       books.xsd       othello.xml     play.dtd

a question out of list subject I'm able to connect easely to the svn
rep from command line using :

but i have also a GUI client for svn which asks for an URI starting
with svn:// , i don't know how to translate the https:// one to the
svn:// one.

may be that's because the client is able to upload, then, that's
clear...