Problem installing PEAR on a shared host

I'm trying to install a local copy of PEAR on a shared host (I can't add packages to the central copy) and have tried the instructions at http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.shared.php . The following is what I get: bash-2.05a$ pear -s -c ~/.pearrc -d doc_dir=~/pear/docs -d ext_dir=~/pear/ext -d php_dir=~/pear/lib -d data_dir=~/pear/data -d test_dir=~/pear/tests -d cache_dir=~/pear/cache -d bin_dir=~/pear/bin pear: unknown config file type `userdefined' bash-2.05a$ Any suggestions as to what is going wrong? Thanks, Geoff