Crop a shapefile during import

Q: Is it possible to crop a SHAPE file while importing it into GRASS (so, subregion import only)?

A: Yes, easily:

First set the computational region of interest, with

  g.region -p e=<east bound> w=<west bound> n=<north> s=<south>

then simply limit the SHAPE file import to the current region:

  v.in.ogr -r vectmap.shp out=vectmap