[Xastir] GNIS data: populated places

[Jason Winningham]

I've been playing with maps lately (what else would an xastir user do 
if the radio is working OK?).

One of the things I wanted was some of the "populated places"  (ppl in 
field 4) from all states in one file, so I can have city names for the 
whole country in a smaller data set than all 50 something GNIS files.  
I was about to write a script to do create this for me when I found 
this:

http://geonames.usgs.gov/stategaz/POP_PLACES.zip

It's already been done by the good folks at USGS.  Download this file, 
unzip it, stick it in your maps directory with a .gnis instead of .TXT 
and you're good to go.

The file has over 181k records in it.  You can use the following 
command to weed out all places with populations less than 1000, and get 
it down to just under 14k records, which is really fast to load:

awk -F\| '{if ($17 > 1000) print $0}' 
/usr/local/share/xastir/GNIS/0pop_places.gnis 
 >/usr/local/share/xastir/GNIS/0pop_places_over_1k.gnis

I stuck a zero at the beginning of the filename so this would show up 
in the GNIS directory before any of the state files.

I may have been the only one who didn't know about this, but I'm happy 
enough to find it that I'll tell everyone anyway.

-Jason
kg4wsv