DOCBOOK-APPS: trying to test xerces with "java sax.Counter <file.xml>"

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at mindspring dot com>]

  i can't seem to get java to find the sax.Counter class to play
with some of the xerces stuff.

  first, under red hat 8.0, i've installed sun's jdk 1.4.1,
and that seems to work fine, with the full path being
/usr/java/j2sdk-1.4.1.

  according to the docs, i can add some extensions as long
as i add the ".jar" files to .../jre/lib/ext, which is where
i copied the .jar files from the latest xerces version.

  however, when i run something simple like

$ java sax.Counter <file.xml>

i get an error that the class is not found, despite the fact
that it's clearly in the xercesSamples.jar file in that "ext"
directory.

  if, OTOH, i explicitly refer to it with

$ java -classpath /usr/java/.../xercesSamples.jar <file.xml>

it works. 

  i thought any jar files added to the ext/ directory were 
considered automatically available as "extensions". am i
missing something?

rday