Is there a commandline tool for intersecting Shapefiles?

Question

in QGIS vectorlayers can be intersected. That is apparently done by ftools and seems to be integrated into the QGIS-program itself.

That is different from many other functions that call GDAL-tools.

I would like to intersect esri-shapefiles in a script and without having to load anything into QGIS. Is there a GDAL-tool or some other commandline-suite that will do this?

It would be nice to have a tool that handles the shapefile natively (GDAL-tools do that) without having to import it or convert it to some internal format.

An alternate solution would be a commandline-interface to ftools.

THX stn

Answer 1

This post on the gdal-dev mailing list by Warmerdam himself says it's not possible with gdal tools directly, but it can be programmed using one of the available language wrappers (i.e. Python):

The key method is OGRGeometry::Intersection() which when invoked on one geometry with another geometry will return a new geometry which is their intersection.

Note that this method depends on GDAL/OGR having been built against the GEOS geometry library which really does the work.