CLI Overview

pbfhogg includes a command-line toolkit for common OSM PBF operations. Install it with:

cargo install pbfhogg-cli

The binary is called pbfhogg. Requires Rust 1.96+.

Commands at a Glance

Command	Description
inspect	File inspection: metadata, block breakdown, ordering, tag frequencies
check	Validate IDs and referential integrity
cat	Concatenate PBFs with optional type filtering
sort	Sort into standard order (nodes, ways, relations by ID)
repack	Re-encode a PBF with a configurable per-blob element cap
degrade	Produce a valid-but-adversarial PBF for benchmarking non-optimal paths
extract	Extract by bounding box or GeoJSON polygon (simple/complete/smart)
tags-filter	Filter elements by tag expressions (PBF or OSC input)
export	Stream tagged nodes/ways to GeoJSON or GeoJSONSeq
diff	Compare two PBFs; --format osc generates an OSC diff
getid	Extract or remove elements by ID
getparents	Find ways/relations referencing given IDs
apply-changes	Apply OSC diff to a sorted PBF with blob passthrough
add-locations-to-ways	Embed node coordinates in ways
renumber	Renumber all element IDs sequentially
time-filter	Filter history PBF to a point-in-time snapshot
merge-changes	Merge multiple OSC files into one
build-geocode-index	Build reverse geocoding index (S2 cells, mmap-ready)

Common Flags

Most write commands accept:

• -o, --output <FILE> - output file
• --compression <SPEC> - none, zlib (default), zstd, or with level (zlib:9, zstd:19)
• --direct-io - bypass page cache (Linux, requires linux-direct-io feature)
• --force - proceed without indexdata (slower)

See Commands for the full reference.