All varieties of ESRI Shapefiles should be available for reading, and simple 3D files can be created.
Normally the OGR Shapefile driver treats a whole directory of shapefiles as a dataset, and a single shapefile within that directory as a layer. In this case the directory name should be used as the dataset name. However, it is also possible to use one of the files (.shp, .shx or .dbf) in a shapefile set as the dataset name, and then it will be treated as a dataset with one layer.
Currently the shapefile driver always returns polygons, rather than multipolygons, even for polygons with multiple outer rings. This is a violation of the OGR (and Simple Features) data model, and will be corrected at some point in the future. The new ESRI measure values are discarded if encountered.
If a .prj files in old Arc/Info style or new ESRI OGC WKT style is present, it will be read and used to associate a projection with features.