# GSHHS

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
EXAMPLES
BUGS
SEE ALSO

## NAME

gshhs − Extract ASCII listings from binary GSHHS or WDBII data files

## SYNOPSIS

gshhs binaryfile.b [ −I id ] [ −L ] [ −M ] > asciifile.txt

## DESCRIPTION

gshhs reads the binary coastline (GSHHS) or political boundary or river (WDBII) files and extracts an ASCII listing. It automatically handles byte-swabbing between different architectures. Optionally, only segment header info can be displayed. The header info has the format ID npoints hierarchical-level source area f_area west east south north container ancestor, where hierarchical levels for coastline polygons go from 1 (shoreline) to 4 (lake inside island inside lake inside land). Source is either W (World Vector Shoreline) or C (CIA World Data Bank II); lower case is used if a lake is a river-lake. The west east south north is the enclosing rectangle, area is the polygon area in km^2 while f_area is the actual area of the ancestor polygon, container is the ID of the polygon that contains this polygon (-1 if none), and ancestor is the ID of the polygon in the full resolution set that was reduced to yield this polygon (-1 if full resolution). For line data the header is simply ID npoints hierarchical-level source west east south north
binaryfile.b

GSHHS or WDBII binary data file as distributed with the GSHHS data supplement. Any of the 5 standard resolutions (full, high, intermediate, low, crude) can be used.

| −I |  | Only output information for the polygon that matches id [default outputs all polygons].
| −L |  | Only output a listing of polygon or line segment headers [default outputs headers and data records].
| −M |  | Start all header records with the GMT multiple segment indicator ’>’ [Default uses P for polygons and L for lines].

## EXAMPLES

To convert the entire intermediate GSHHS binary data to ASCII, run

gshhs gshhs_i.b > gshhs_i.txt

To only get a listing of the headers for the river data set at full resolution, try

gshhs wdb_rivers_f.b −L > riverlisting.txt

## BUGS

While the GSHHS data is organized as a set of closed polygons, the rivers and boundary data are just a set of line segments in no particular order. Thus, it is not possible to extract information pertaining to just one river or one country.

## SEE ALSO

GMT(1), gshhs_dp(1) gshhstograss(1)