Dealing with corrupted shapefiles can be a painful experience: programs crash for seemingly no reason, attribute tables get screwy, features get lost, queries results don’t look right and ArcGIS processing tools fail with mysterious error codes:

Never fear, OGR is here. The magic bullet for fixing corrupted shapefiles is, 90% of the time, accomplished by using ogr2ogr to convert the shapefile to another shapefile.

ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile"  shiny_new_clean_dataset.shp corrupted_dataset.shp corrupted_dataset

OGR’s internal data model cleans it up and the output is a fresh shiny new shapefile that works without hassle.