A line is a single straight line segment defined by one start node, one end node and no other nodes. A polyline is also defined by one start node, one end node and no other nodes, but is made of two or more consecutive straight line segments. The connections between the constituent line segments of a polyline do not appear as nodes in the vector map.
v.build.polyline picks a line and from its start node, walks back as long as exactly one other line is connected to this node. Line directions are reversed as required, i.e. it does not matter if the next line is connected to the current node by its start or end node. Once the start line of a polyline is identified, it walks forward and adds all vertices (in reverse order if needed) of connected lines to the start line, i.e. the start line and connecting lines are reversed as needed. That is, if a line is reversed depends on what node is initially picked for building polylines. If the direction of lines is important (it's not for boundaries to build areas), you have to manually change line directions with either v.edit, v.digit, or the wxGUI vector digitizer.
Polylines provide the most appropriate representation of curved lines when it is important that nodes serve to define topology rather than geometry. Curved lines are usually digitized as polylines, but these are sometimes broken into their constituent straight line segments during conversion from one data format to another. v.build.polylines can be used to rebuild such broken polylines.
Category number(s) are assigned to a polyline based on cats parameter.
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