How it works...

GDAL is an open source library that comes together with several command-line utilities, which let the user translate and process raster and vector geodatasets into a plethora of formats. In the case of vector datasets, there is a GDAL sublibrary for managing vector datasets named OGR (therefore, when talking about vector datasets in the context of GDAL, we can also use the expression OGR dataset).

When you are working with an OGR dataset, two of the most popular OGR commands are ogrinfo, which lists many kinds of information from an OGR dataset, and ogr2ogr, which converts the OGR dataset from one format to another.

It is possible to retrieve a list of the supported OGR vector formats using the -formats option on any OGR commands, ...

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