Command line utility to dump Esri Shapefiles in human-readable format. Written a long time ago to peek into those files.
Shapefiles are a file format for storing vector GIS data, developed by Esri around 1990 for their ArcView 2.x software. A shapefile consists of several files, all with the same basename, but different extensions. The .shp (shape data), .shx (index), .dbf (attribute data) files are mandatory, others are optional (e.g., .prj with spatial reference information).
Shapefiles are widely used, mainly because of Esri's public specification in the Shapefile Technical Description White Paper (local copy).
More information can be found, as usual, at Wikipedia. Note that, somewhat weirdly, shapefiles (.shp) use a mixture of big- and little-endian byte ordering.
The command line tool here was written a long time ago to dump shapefiles to a human-readable format. It only deals with the shape file proper (.shp), not with any of the other files, and it handles only a common subset of all shape types.
A plain make in the top level directory should do.
shpdump [-V] [-p prec] [-ghvx] [shapefile]
Read from stdin or the file given on the command line a shapefile and dump it to stdout in a plain text representation that is easy to read for humans and machines. Any complaints go to stderr.
Options:
-V identify program and version to stdout and exit 0
-g dump in Arc GENERATE format
-h header only: quit after dump of shapefile header
-v verbose: dump more stuff about the shapefile
-x report inconsistencies in the shapefile to stderr
-p use given precision (digits after decimal point; deflt 2)
Exit codes:
0 ok
1 invalid (with -x only) or not fully supported shapefile
111 temporary error, e.g. troubles reading or writing
127 permanent error, e.g. invalid command line args
Please refer to the documentation in doc/shpdump.html.
The file src/shpdump.pl contains a simple Perl CGI frontend.
The links in the documentation and in the Perl script probably no longer exist.
The dot files have recently been added before publishing to GitHub.