Error - ERROR 1: Unable to find driver `‘ESRI'. while running ogr2ogr command

Question

I have installed gdal

$ conda install -c esri gdal

And then tried to run the command to merge 2 shapefiles

$ ogr2ogr -f ‘ESRI Shapefile’ n4600e00800_30.tif_highlight-1.shp n4600e00900_30.tif_highlight-1.shp 

but getting error

ERROR 1: Unable to find driver `‘ESRI'.

Not sure if the driver needs to be installed separately as couldn't find much on this error.

Answer 1

The ‘...’ quotes are the problem. Try double quotes: -f "ESRI Shapefile"

I'm not sure this is going to do what you expect. ogr2ogr converts between formats, it doesnt merge files. In your case it will results in a shapefile called n4600e00800_30.tif_highlight-1.shp that is identical to n4600e00900_30.tif_highlight-1.shp. Transformations between the same format are generally only useful if you add a filter, are changing coordinate reference system, etc.

What you are probably looking for is ogrmerge.py which should be callable from your CLI after installing GDAL. Your command should look like this then:

ogrmerge.py -o merged.shp n4600e00800_30.tif_highlight-1.shp n4600e00900_30.tif_highlight-1.shp

You can also add -f "ESRI Shapefile" to ensure that it writes to the correct format but it'll guess the format from the extension, .shp is a pretty safe bet that it'll get it right.