Mapping Hacks

Speak in Geotongues: GPSBabel to the Rescue #51

Chapter 5, Mapping with Gadgets

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HACK

Much of the power of GPSBabel is masked by the graphical user interfaces,

however. As an example, only the Mac OS X GUI allows access to the Filter

commands, and even it does not support the newer filter options.

Using GPSBabel from the Command Line

As with many powerful tools, the command line is where the interesting

functionality lives. The trade-off is a small learning curve. The basic GPSBa-

bel command looks like this:

gpsbabel [options] -i INTYPE -f INFILE -o OUTTYPE -F OUTFILE

INTYPE and OUTTYPE are formats that GPSBabel understands, and INFILE and

OUTFILE are the locations of that data. That location can be either a file or

the name of a physical device, such as com1 under Windows or /dev/ttyS0

under Linux.

Let’s say you have latitude, longitude, and waypoint name in the file way.csv:

40.70175, -103.68998, First Waypoint

39.28553, -123.79357, Another point

42.49638, -108.72995, And a third

Use this command to convert this file to the GPX-format file way.gpx:

$ gpsbabel -i csv -f way.csv -o gpx -F way.gpx

Deconstructing the command line, -i csv indicates that the input file uses

comma-separated values;

-f way.csv (note that this is lowercase) specifies

Figure 5-4. GUI wrapper for GPSBabel, gpsbabelfront, under Microsoft Windows