How do I list all installed programs?

Question

How do I list both programs that came with my distribution and those I manually installed?

Answer 1

That depends on your distribution.

• Aptitude-based distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, etc): dpkg -l
• RPM-based distributions (Fedora, RHEL, etc): rpm -qa
• pkg*-based distributions (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc): pkg_info
• Portage-based distributions (Gentoo, etc): equery list or eix -I
• pacman-based distributions (Arch Linux, etc): pacman -Q
• Cygwin: cygcheck --check-setup --dump-only *
• Slackware: slapt-get --installed

All of these will list the packages rather than the programs however. If you truly want to list the programs, you probably want to list the executables in your $PATH, which can be done like so using bash's compgen:

compgen -c

Or, if you don't have compgen:

#!/bin/bash
IFS=: read -ra dirs_in_path <<< "$PATH"

for dir in "${dirs_in_path[@]}"; do
    for file in "$dir"/*; do
        [[ -x $file && -f $file ]] && printf '%s\n' "${file##*/}"
    done
done

Answer 2

Answering the second part of the question (nothing really to be added to Chris' answer for the first part):

There is generally no way of listing manually installed programs and their components. This is not recorded anywhere if you didn't use a package manager. All you can do is find the binaries in standard locations (like Chris suggested) and in a similar way, guess where some libraries or some manual pages etc. came from. That is why, whenever possible, you should always install programs using your package manager.

Answer 3

All the other answers (so far) deal with packages and binaries. If you mean "desktop applications", the ones that appear in your start menu, you can try:

ls /usr/share/applications | awk -F '.desktop' ' { print $1}' -

More solutions in another question.

Answer 4

Programs should be reachable via the PATH, so just list everything in the path:

ls ${PATH//:/ }

Expect a result of about 3k-4k programs.

To exclude a probable minority of false positives, you may refine the approach:

for d in ${PATH//:/ } ; do 
    for f in $d/* ; do  
        test -x $f && test -f $f && echo $f
    done
done

It didn't make a difference for me.