ping or not to ping that is a solaris quirk

A network colleague of mine mentioned that there's an interesting quirk with the ping command under Solaris. The -s flag which does a continuous ping and prints each result apparently doesn't work when DNS servers are not available.

Interestingly enough, ping without the -s flag will work. In order to get ping to work with the -s flag it is also necessary to use the -n option, which tells the system not to do DNS lookups.