RECLASSIFY POINTS INSIDE POLYGON WITHOUT CREATING NEW FILE

[Bobby Riley]

Jochen,

Is there a way to reclassify points within a polygon and NOT create a new output file? I have a very large task involving ~100,000 tiles where I just want to reclassify points inside  polygons.  I would rather not have to create an entire new set of output tiles for such a simple operation. Being able to do so would save an enormous amount of diskspace.

Thank you,

Bobby

[Jochen Rapidlasso]

Hi Bobby,

LAStools is designed so that data is always read, processed, and then written.
Doing this directly to a file is risky: in the event of a processing error, file I/O error, or logical error
— such as incorrect arguments — the files would be lost.
To do this, at least one backup of the data would be required.
That would bring us back to making a copy — so we wouldn’t have gained anything.

The only workaround — assuming a backup exists — would be the following procedure:
Read all files in a loop, processing them one by one and delete the source file as soon as it has been written correctly.
This approach requires significantly less storage space.

A simple batch script might look something like this:

@echo off
:: force dyn loop vars
SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion
:: source dir
set "sdir=C:\path\to\process"
:: change to this dir
cd /d "%sdir%"
:: loop over files
for %%f in (*) do (
    :: exec lastools command
    las3dpoly64 -i "%%f" -...
    :: delete source after processing
    del "%%f"
)

echo done.
pause

Please test the script thoroughly with some sample data before deploying it in production!

Cheers,

Jochen @rapidlasso

[Bobby Riley]

I very much appreciate the quick response, Jochen!

Enjoy your day.

Bobby