This is a keen little script to take a GNIS datafile and break it down into much smaller chunks. Running the script on around 12 megabytes of data took perhaps 5 minutes on my 90mhz pentium laptop, where both speed and disk space are at a premium (only 600 megs of disk!).

Let me put it in perspective for you: to get 6.5 megs of free disk so that I could manipulate the files, I needed to choose which system files (i.e. kernel modules, peculiar utilities in /usr/X11/bin, logfiles) I didn't need and could delete. This is just to hold around 120 megabytes of maps for the mobile station.

Using the smaller files, I find that scrolling and zooming the map takes much less time (big files took 30-40 seconds, smaller files takes 20-30 seconds).

  • split_gnis.bash

    This script requires bash, sed, tr, grep, and fromdos. fromdos may not be included in your distribution, however it is part of Slackware. So run Slackware!