• Windows command-line application for the flexibility of batch files and external access.
• Extract point, line and polygon features for the following datasets:
• Streets
• Hydrography
• Non-visible, physical and miscellaneous lines
• Landmarks
• Tracts, block groups and blocks
• Counties, county subdivisions, cities, etc.
• Metropolitan statistical areas, urban areas, combined statistical areas, etc.
• School districts
• Congressional districts
• Native American/Alaska Native/Hawaiian Homeland areas
• ZIP Codes
• More...
• Shapefile attributes contain feature names, types, class codes, class descriptions and other available data
• No ESRI license/external third-party software needed.
• No install/uninstall, simply run the utility from the command-line.

As of March 31, 2008, the Census Bureau has begun distributing it's TIGER/Line data in the Shapefile format. You can download it here.

This is a command-line application and must be called with a few basic space-seperated arguments:

TIGER.exe [tiger file path and prefix] [shapefile path and prefix] [optional multi-part indicator]

File and path names can be absolute or relative. As always, surround them with quotes if they contain spaces. The optional multi-part indicator is the word EXPLODE if you do not want multi-part polygon features. Otherwise, simply omit the EXPLODE indicator.

For help and usage information, enter TIGER.EXE at the command line with no arguments.

Click here for access to TIGER/Line 2006 second edition data download.