How do I list all installed programs?

Question

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

Which distribution? Each distribution has different installing tools. — Matteo, Sep 18 '11 at 19:43
Hm, I'm interested in Red Hat, Ubuntu, and cygwin. Is there a distribution-free way to list the programs with some command line argument? — InquilineKea, Sep 18 '11 at 20:07

Chris Down · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-17T03:10:20.350

94

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

edited Feb 17 '14 at 03:10

answered Sep 18 '11 at 20:26

Chris Down

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And for RPM based systems (Red Hat, SuSE, CentOS, etc.): `rpm -qa` – nos Sep 18 '11 at 21:10
Doesn't Fedora nowadays use `dnf`. I do not know the exact command. – Tristan Jun 29 '16 at 18:52
I am using an Aptitude-based distributions. What should I add to this command to know how much space this program takes up? – LandonZeKepitelOfGreytBritn Mar 03 '17 at 12:05
2

Debian / Ubuntu is `dkpg -l | grep ^ii`. – Rolf Feb 06 '18 at 10:37
1

@Rolf, you mean dPKg – Harkály Gergő May 12 '18 at 17:52
Yes, Harkály Gergő, `dpkg`. It was a typo, thanks for pointing it out. – Rolf May 13 '18 at 14:37
1

Hrmph... The BSDs are not Linux distributions... – Kusalananda May 13 '18 at 14:44
1

@Kusalananda Huh? At no point in this answer does it say that BSDs are Linux distributions, but they are *distributions*. That's literally what the "D" in BSD stands for. – Chris Down May 14 '18 at 13:33
2

It would be better to distinguish between package managers instead of "distributions". NetBSD's pkgsrc runs on any Linux, and some package managers can be used on multiple Uinces. – Kusalananda May 14 '18 at 13:43

score 13 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

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.

user unknown · Answer 3 · 2017-03-17T22:29:44.700

7

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.

edited Mar 17 '17 at 22:29

answered Mar 24 '12 at 23:43

user unknown

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Note that this will also potentially list various non-programs as well (subdirectories of directories in `$PATH`, etc). – Chris Down Mar 25 '12 at 03:03
1

I added a test, but it didn't make a difference for me (how useful is a directory in a directory in the path, which isn't itself in the path?). But for cases, where you rely on correctness, it might be useful. – user unknown Mar 25 '12 at 05:42
1

awesome! I wasn't able to know version of Linux ( long story - but nothing criminal ) but this code saved my day :) – obenjiro Jan 12 '15 at 18:15

Rolf · Answer 4 · 2018-05-13T14:40:46.450

7

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}' -

How do I list all installed programs?

4 Answers4

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