specification - In an ESRI Shapefile, what is the "Record Number" field of each record header in the .shp file?

The shapefile specification (http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf) only says "Record numbers begin at 1." (page 5), which doesn't specify what the field actually is. As per page 25, each shape feature must correlate to exactly 1 record in the DBF, and their order must be identical. So the "Record Number" field is not for any purpose related to the DBF. My interpretation is that the "Record Number" field is required to count up from 1 to the number of shape features in the shape file. But this being completely redundant, I am unsure whether I missed something?

Some clarifications after reading your answers and comments:

1. I am writing a reader/writer for shapefiles, so I need to parse them correctly as well as produce valid output.



2. Shapefiles as well as DBF files have an "intrinsic" record number (let's call them A and B). The first shape / record after the header in the shapefile / DBF has A=1 / B=1, the next has A=2 / B=2, and so on. The shapefile specification clearly states that the shapes and records have a one-to-one relationship based on these numbers, so the attributes for shape A=1 are contained in record B=1, and so on. Neither A nor B is the "Record Number" field I am asking about.


3. Each shape in the shapefile also has an (explicit) INT32 field in its shape header, which is called "Record Number" in the shapefile specification. This is where my confusion starts. Let's call this value C. The specification requires that this field starts at 1 (so for shape A=1, it must be C=1). But it doesn't give any other rules (such as "increment C by 1 for each shape"), nor does it give any semantic meaning to this field. So it seems to me that C is indeed meaningless. But if that is true, the shapefile is bloated by 4 unneeded bytes for each shape, which seems weird to me. So I want to be sure I am not missing anything...


4. I have no idea where things like "FID, OID, OBJID, or OBJECTID" come from. I am not using any ESRI products, but glancing at http://support.esri.com/es/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/37480 I conclude that those are properties / attributes some ESRI products use and store in the DBF file associated with the shapefile. If that is so, this has nothing to do with my question.