qgis - Geoprocessing tool Difference from the Terminal?

I have used QGIS Geoprocessing tool Difference to cut polylines (SHP) into to smaller pieces using a polygon (SHP). This works very good in QGIS.

Now, to speed up the process, I'd like to be able to do the exact same thing but from the Terminal (so I can later make a shell script).

Maybe GDAL has these functions? In that case, how?

I'm using a Mac.

Answer

Maybe can you try ogr2ogr -clipdst DATASOURCE destinationFile sourceFile. For example : ogr2ogr-clipdst yourPolygon.shp destinationFile yourPolylines.shp.

But, in this case, you will cut one shapefile with another. If you want to cut your polylines shapefile with each features of a polygon shapefile, you must split the polygon shapefile and iterate over each polygon feature. For example: ogr2ogr -clipdst myFirstPolygonFeature destinationFile yourPolylines.shp.

Here is the man page: http://www.gdal.org/ogr2ogr.html.