shputil.py was born out of a need to modify large (>1GB) shapefiles
that could not be easily or successfully managed in programs like QGIS.
As an example QGIS was unable to perform a simple string
search-and-replace on a file with over 200,000 records, remaining
unresponsive and consuming 100% CPU even after 10 minutes. By comparison
shputil.py is able to perform the same operation, using
replace-field-values, in under 90 seconds.
Development is driven by my needs and not to make shputil.py
comprehensive, e.g. replace-field-values to support non-string
replacements. Pull requests are however very welcome!