SHPADD(1)

📦
version 1.6.3 · 10 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

✨ SHPADD(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to shpadd from shplib — she's the girl who appends a shape to an ESRI shapefile and she does it flawlessly 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

shpadd — append a shape to an ESRI shapefile

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

shpadd shp_file [[x y] [+]]*

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So basically, shpadd appends a shape to the shapefile that it figures out from shp_file ✨

The geometric data of your brand-new shape is made of lists of X/Y points that you drop right there on the command line, grouped into parts — and points that live in different parts get separated by a plus sign (+). Iconic, honestly.

If you give her no points and no parts at all? Then a shape of type NullShape gets appended to the shapefile. Otherwise the type of the new shape is decided by the shapefile's header, no cap. Peep shpdump(1) for a rundown of shape types and how geometric data for parts gets interpreted for any specific type 👑

Heads up bestie: shpadd(1) does NOT enforce any of the geometric restrictions set by the shapefile specification. Like, none. Zero. She trusts you. 🫶

Shapefiles are actually two files — same basename, extensions .shp and .shx (or .SHP and .SHX) — holding the shape data and the shape index respectively 💫 The files to open get determined by first stripping any filename extension off of file, then attempting to open shp_file.shp or shp_file.SHP, and shp_file.shx or shp_file.SHX, for the respective data and index files. It's giving two peas in a pod 🍓

🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

  • shp_file — the name of an existing shapefile, bestie. She has to already be there.
  • x1 y1 x2 y2 ... xn yn — the set of x,y coordinates that describes the shape you wish to add 💕
Real talk: you must specify the correct number of parameters for a given type of shapefile. For example: for point shapefiles you have to pass 1 pair of XY coordinates, and for a polygon shapefile you should pass at least 4 pairs of XY coordinates — where the first and the last point must have the same coordinates 🦋

🧚 EXAMPLE 🧚

shpadd testpolygon 100000 7000000 250000 6500000 200000 6000000 100000 7000000

Assuming that testpolygon is a polygon shapefile, this command line will insert a new shape (a triangle, periodt 🔺) into testpolygon with the following XY coordinates:

vertice 0: 100000 7000000 (this will also be the vertice where the shape starts and ends)
vertice 1: 250000 6500000
vertice 2: 200000 6000000
vertice 3: 100000 7000000

⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

  • 0 — Successful program execution 🎉 she ate, no crumbs.
  • 1 — Missing shp_file argument, the shapefile can't be opened, or the program ran out of memory 😭

💀 DIAGNOSTICS 💀

The following diagnostics may be issued on stdout:

Unable to open:shp_file
Out of memory

👑 AUTHOR 👑

shpadd is part of shapelib, maintained by Frank Warmerdam. This guide was created by Eduardo Patoo Kanegae and converted to manpage by Johan Van de Wauw 🙌

🙈 BUGS 🙈

  • Coordinate values that can't be be parsed by sscanf(3) get undefined values. Yeah. Undefined. Be careful out there bestie 🚨
  • There's no way to give measure or Z data to vertices in a shape — but those are always set to zero if the shapefile's shape type requires those values.
  • MultiPatch shape types aren't supported. Not today, not ever 💔

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

dbfadd(1), dbfcat(1), dbfcreate(1), dbfdump(1), dbfinfo(1), shpcat(1), shpcentrd(1), shpcreate(1), shpdump(1), shpdxf(1), shpfix(1), shpinfo(1), shpproj(1), shprewind(1), shptest(1)

March 2026 — that's the date, and this lil legend lives in shplib, filed under SHPADD(1) 💜 mwah, go add some shapes bestie 💖✨🎀

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