I needed to merge a bunch of shape files into one. These files were all in a folder, but each shape file was in a separate sub-folder. So I copied them all into a folder together to merge them. First I navigated to the folder that had all the sub folders, and then I ran…
cp `find . -name "*"` ../all_shp ogrmerge.py -single -o merged.shp ../all_shp/*.shp
Voila! A single shape file made up of all the shape files I copied into the “all_shp” folder!