The ogrinfo utility

The official documentation for the ogrinfo utility is http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogrinfo.html

-so Summary Only

supress listing of features, show only the summary information like projection, schema, feature count and extents.

To get this info with shapefiles you must also provide the layer name, else not much useful is returned:

$ ogrinfo -so contours.shp

INFO: Open of `contours.shp'
  using driver `ESRI Shapefile' successful.
1: contours (Line String)

Likely what is really wanted is:

$ ogrinfo -so contours.shp contours

INFO: Open of `contours.shp'
      using driver `ESRI Shapefile' successful.

Layer name: contours
Geometry: Line String
Feature Count: 3393
Extent: (57537.995662, 663561.802226) - (88297.082026, 694443.881449)
Layer SRS WKT:
PROJCS["Albers",
...etc.

Alternatively, use the -al switch to see information on all layers.