Frank Warmerdam is pretty good at following the release early, release often creed of open source development. It’s not uncommon to get more than one FWToolsrelease a month. Go Frank!   However this proficiency adds work which this end user would just as soon avoid. So being a lazy guy, I spent a number of hours writing some scripts to save me 15 minutes everytime there is a new release. ;-)

The result is gdal_extras which is now available from http://code.google.com/p/maphew/

Basic use guide:

1. unpack gdal_extras somewhere
2. Install latest version of FWTools
3. Open FWTools Shell and run c:\path\to\gdal_extras\gdal-extras-install.bat

And that’s it.

Other than the ease of adding these improvements to new installs, the utility I like the best is gdal-help, because I’m forever forgetting how to spell the commands.\ \ —-\ Optionally, create an NTFS Junction of c:\local\fwtools to c:\program files\fwtools2.0.4 so you can work with a path without spaces and still accept the defaults\     http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys.../Junction.mspx\     http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfslinkext\     \ The following components were written by others. There may be newer/better versions than what I have here.

.\bin\\     fusion.py            - Mario Beauchamp \     gdalcopyproj.py    - Schuyler Erle\     gdal_vrtmerge.py    - Gabriel Ebner

.\gdal_plugins\

\

gdal_SDE_9x.dll    - Howard Butler