Well, just because you asked, I'll go into the ugly details (this is mostly academic help for other people who will get into this situation too).

I'm normally a Linux/BSD type of guy. I have run solaris and played in it before, but never a solaris pre 7. So when I came to this site to start working on some new tools for them, and I was given a SunOS 5.6 account, I was without all sorts of tools.

So after getting bash built okay, I started setting things up in my .bashrc. For example, 'make' and 'cc' live in very different places on old SunOS boxes than they do on BSD or GNU (/usr/ccs/bin and /usr/ucb in this case, respectively). Also, the default path given to me was /bin and /usr/bin, which was absolutely pathetic. So I figured out that I wanted my path to include all the Solaris binaries (i'll be damned if i have to go and build 'ls'), so I have a path laid out like this in my .bashrc:

  PATH=''

  PATH=$PATH:/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/sbin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/ucb
  PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
  PATH=$PATH:$HOME/perl/bin
[download]

However, when vi goes to execute perldoc, as Masem just pointed out, it is looking through the path and finding first perldoc in /usr/local/bin , which then points to /usr/local/lib/perl { ... }, and I (not being of rootly powers) cannot put new modules there. So I (innocently and successfully but probably not correctly) just put an alias in my .bashrc which made 'perl' and 'perldoc' point to the appropriate binaries under my home directory.

I'm not convinced putting my homedir/bin paths above the SunOS paths is a better, safer idea than using an alias (because of the very issues Masem suggested), but it is the only way, apparently, to make vi understand that I dont want the system perldoc, I want _my_ perldoc.

Thanks Masem, virtualsue.
brother dep.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.