[Xastir] ESRI shapefiles and dbfawk

[Curt Mills]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, James Ewen wrote:

> I'm attempting to build a dbfawk file for the shapefile that I have.
>
> I'm following along with Tom's dbfawk tutorial. I've figured out most of it,
> but have not yet found out how to build dbfinfo. Yup, it may be a part of
> the shapefile "contrib" directory... What the heck does that mean?

That means if you installed shapelib from sources, there's a
"contrib" subdirectory.  It contains additional tools that can be
used with Shapefiles, but it's not directly part of Shapelib.


> Give me some great instructions like the Cygwin install tutorial and I can
> get this stuff working.

Download Shapelib, gunzip/untar the file, go into the new
directories created, find the contrib directory.  Type "make".  If
you're lucky you'll end up with some new executables there that you
can use.

There are tools in the main shapelib directory and in the contrib
dirctory that might be of use.


> >From what I read, not only do I need to find out the names of the fields,
> but I also have to determine the values used. Will dbfinfo help me determine
> this, or do I need another tool?

dbfinfo, dbfcat, dbfdump, shpinfo, shpcat, shpdump.  Those are the
ones I've used.  The shp file contains the points/vectors/polygon
info.  The dbf file contains the attributes that go along with each
shape.


> Also, how do I determine whether or not dbfawk is enabled in Xastir? I don't
> know if it's included in the standard cygwin install, or if I need to add it
> in.

Check your summary.log file or look at your Help->About window.  It
should be listed in both places.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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