How to find the attributes of a shapefile from the command line?

Question

I'm following Mike Bostock's tutorial "Let's Make A Map." He explains how to filter a shapefile using ogr2ogr based on the attributes of the features. I can open a shapefile in QGIS and look at the attribute table to find out what those features are. Is there a way to find that information from the command line?

Answer 1

ogrinfo -so -al yourshapefile.shp

This will give you geometry type, number of features/shapes, bounding box corners, projection information, and the name of each attribute file as well as the datatype stored in those attributes.

Answer 2

Please check out https://github.com/GeospatialPython/pyshp an easy way to get information about shapefile.

Answer 3

Have you tried this method:

-where restricted_where:

Attribute query (like SQL WHERE)

http://www.gdal.org/ogr2ogr.html

This link has many examples of ogr sql:

http://www.compsci.wm.edu/SciClone/documentation/software/geo/gdal-1.9.0/html/ogr/ogr_sql.html