Using Command-Line Tools - Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools - page 191

Figure 11.7: VRT raster over the parcel shapefile
to quickly locate the features of interest. There is more than one way
to create a spatial index. In Section D.1 , Spatial Indexes, on page 333 ,
you will see how to create one using QGIS. Of course, there is a way
to do this from the command line as well. You'll find this useful if you
have a whole batch of shapefiles you want to index. Rather than load-
ing each one into QGIS, opening the properties dialog box, and clicking
the button to build the index, you can just write a simple script to do
the job. To create a spatial index, use the shptree application. You can
get shptree in a number of ways. It's included in the FWTools 9 distribu-
tion as well as in MapServer. 10 You're probably going to want FWTools
anyway, because it contains all the OGR and GDAL utilities we've been
using and a lot more goodies. Let's look at the usage:
$ shptree
Syntax:
shptree <shpfile> [<depth>] [<index_format>]
9. http://fwtools.maptools.org
10. http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu