Hello robloesch,
well, you are probably with AIX 5.3 and not 3.5 :-) I know that "uname" makes it a bit strange sometimes!
That aside, it would be good to upgrade your CMOD at one point in the future!! :-)
Now to your questions:
"arsdoc get" will get the document without altering anything, no indexes will be touched, no content will be modified.
The same can be said for "arsdoc query".
When you use the "arsdoc get" command, then you'll get the original file, without any transformation.
Does that answer your questions?
Regards,
Alessandro