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I want to reverse the line direction for all lines in a shapefile from the Linux commandline (that is to say, using a script). Currently I'm using the SwapVectorDirection QGIS plugin which works well but has to be run manually. Ideally I'd like a solution using ogr since I have it installed on my system.
This question is similar but I'm looking specifically for something I can include in a Linux script.
Use the ogr2ogr utility with the ST_REVERSE function in a SQL statement and OGR SQLite dialect:
For example:
ogr2ogr -dialect SQLITE -sql "select st_reverse(GEOMETRY), * from input" output.shp input.shp
Note: You need to pass in the st_reverse(GEOMETRY) first as the GEOMETRY field is automatically selected if the * wildcard is used and ogr will write only the first geometry out to a single geometry type layer.
st_reverse(GEOMETRY), *; without this I wasn't seeing any reversal. BTW, with the aforementioned caveat the pre-edit version using * worked just fine with ogr2ogr from GDAL 2.2.3. Presumably by putting the function first it overrode the default GEOMETRY column. I'll accept this answer in 24 hours unless a much better answer shows up.
Jan 23, 2020 at 1:52