Get Installed applications list and applications activity

Hi,

Is there a programmatic way to get the list of all installed applications on Linux.

Also, how can we get the application activities in Linux OS like running applications name, time of day when they started, duration till the applications were running on system, application version etc.

Is there a way to do this in C/C++.

I am building an app that runs like a daemon and fetches the applications status and sends it to the network admin for him to monitor the application usage pattern on the user computers in the network.

I really appreciate any help, workaround or code snippet.

Thanks a lot..
Arun

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Is there a programmatic way to get the list of all installed applications on Linux.

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That would be distribution-specific. Actually, package-manager specific. Do you want it for DEB, RPM, or something else?

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running applications name

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Code:

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ps aux

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time of day when they started

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No idea.

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duration till the applications were running on system

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Huh?

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application version

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Depends on package manager.

Maybe do some /proc hacking. I am not an expert, but g00gle something like "/proc filesystem".

"get the list of all installed applications on Linux"

Impossible. Even with what cyberfish said, there is no reason I'd have to use the package manager to install a given tool. Some pretty stellar applications are single source that could be built on the fly. Countless applications are only scripts that run through PHP, Perl, etc.. And you can bet most people wouldn't run as root anyway.

Soma

Why not create a memory dump? Anyway, if you want to list all running _applications_, not _scripts_, that would be possible. All installed ones? Difficult. You could dreate a huge database with every single file any version of any known program installs and its checksum, then scan the whole filesystem and report the results.

"You could dreate a huge database with every single file any version of any known program installs and its checksum, then scan the whole filesystem and report the results."

No. You could not. You couldn't even do that in theory. The sum would change depending on the environment, the platform, the phases of the moon--literally `__TIME__'--etc..

Give it up; write something useful.

Soma