[GRASSLIST:2284] output shapefiles - options?

[David Orme]

Hi,

I'm working with a series of vector files in Grass 5.7 which I need to 
export to shapefiles. The geometry is stored as native grass files and 
the attributes are stored in a PostgreSQL database. I've tried using 
v.out.ogr but there is a problem with exporting attributes with 
character data types (all the character attributes are fixed length) :

> WARNING: pg driver: column 'sm_name', type 0 is not supported

I can think of a number of possible ways forward - getting ODBC working 
and connecting to the pg table that way, using a PostGIS database to 
store geometry and using the pgsql2shp dumper program.

I've tried working with postgis - one problem is I can't get 
pg.postgisdb to create a database: I've pointed to all the correct 
files (incidentally, pg.posgisdb seems to be hard coded to look for 
libpostgis files in ./lib/contrib - I had to create this folder and 
link in the libpostgis files in from their installed location in ./lib) 
but get the following:

> /usr/local/grass57/scripts/pg.postgisdb: line 199: createdb: command 
> not found

I _can_ connect to an existing postgis db created within psql and new 
vector files can be created in that database without problem. The 
problem is that the geometry table contains linestrings for the areas 
and also points for the label points and pgsql2shp can't write both 
types into one file and currently doesn't have the option to 
selectively export geometry types.

Can anyone suggest fixes / tell me if ODBC will export the character 
columns / suggest another alternative?

Many thanks,
David Orme