I'm trying to change a vertex normal to be the same as another one of my choosing, and figured it would be relatively painless to do using the polyNormalPerVertex command. However, I'm having some unexpected results and I can't quite get my head round what's going on:
Just as an example, I randomly select a vertex face, and query the normal:
select -r polySurface13.vtxFace[558][811] ;
polyNormalPerVertex -q -xyz;
// Result: 0.959536 0.161511 -0.230664 //
Which seems fine. Now I try and edit this with some artbitrary values:
polyNormalPerVertex -xyz .2 .3 .4;
// Result: polyNormalPerVertex1 //
and query again:
polyNormalPerVertex -q -xyz;
// Result: 0.371391 0.557086 0.742781 //
Which I really wasn't expecting, and to be honest I have no idea where these values have come from. When I tried this earlier on a different mesh, the normal values were actually unchanged.
Also, I'm not sure what the freezeNormal flag does and how to use that. If I query it:
polyNormalPerVertex -q -freezeNormal;
// Result: 1 //
Which suggests that the normal is frozen, so why was I able to edit it at all before?
If I go ahead and unfreeze it anyway, that's fine but doesn't help me in editing the normal to the values that I want:
polyNormalPerVertex -unFreezeNormal 1;
// Result: polyNormalPerVertex1 //
polyNormalPerVertex -q -freezeNormal;
// Result: 0 //
Although again when I tried this earlier I was unable to actually change the state of the flag, or any of the flags in the command for that matter. I didn't get any error messages, just nothing changed.
I know I must be missing something somewhere, but I'm not sure what and where 
Any help would be great