path issues

["Morgan Reed" <morgan.s.reed%gmail.com@localhost>]

I've an older OpenBSD system (2.9 to be exact), I have been attempting
to build a new gcc toolchain on (Unfortunately I can't upgrade to a
newer OS as I've no physical access to the machine and I'm not game to
attempt a remote upgrade as if things *REALLY* go to hell there is no
simple way to fix it.)

Initially I attempted to build directly from sources but dependencies
kept getting in the way so I decided that pkgsrc might be a better
option.

I've (mostly) successfully bootstrapped the system but I'm running
into issues with the wrong utilities being run from the wrong paths
(much of the software on the system was built from ports (the tree is
no longer "updatable") and I'm trying to limit breakage as much as
possible), is there any way to force pkgsrc to look for it's tools in
a particular path (without modifying my existing shell PATH variable)?

Additionally I'm having an issue with xargs, although pkgsrc built
xargs during bootstrap (xargs is in bootstrap/work/.tools/bin) it has
not been installed ('find /usr/pkg -iname "xargs"' turns up nothing)
so I am seeing errors "xargs: Illegal option -- r" when I attempt to
build packages because pkgsrc is using the system provided xargs
(/usr/bin/xargs) which is a much older version.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Morgan