Detecting Installed Softwares on PC

[sanPerl]

Dear Monks,
I want to develop a program which would scan a PC and tell what Softwares are installed on the said PC. In Windows the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ options shows you list of Installed Softwares, I would like perl script to detect those softwares. Once I get the software names then I can put them in whatever format I want.

I would appreciate all kinds of suggestions/hints/clues/guidance regarding this requirement.
Thanks & Regards, Sandeep Deshpande

[puploki]

As others have said, there are a fair few ways to approach this, so I'll just summarise them:

• Trawl through the registry looking (see How to obtain a list of software applications installed on a Win based PC?) at registered programs.
• Use WMI (quicker) to pull out a list of registered programs: Hardware/Software Inventory
• Use an external program like psinfo to pull out a list of registered programs.
• Scan every .exe on the machine and pull out the publisher, program name and version. You can do this with File::Find::Rule and Win32::AdminMisc.
  This is the approach taken with SMS 2003 and many other vendors in commercial inventory/patching systems.
  There's a code example for this up at codeproject.com.

[sanPerl]

Dear Monks, Thanks a lot for the suggestions. It seems that my problem would solve, if I try all these methods Sandeep

[gargle]

Hi,

Did you do a search before posting? How to obtain a list of software applications installed on a Win based PC? might help you out.

Keep in mind though that applications that don't register themselves in the registry are difficult to find...

[castaway]

Assuming your script is running on the machine you want to check, try using the Win32::Registry modules, and looking in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Uninstall ?

C.

[steelrose]

A commerical off-the-shelf product I used at a previous job searched the entire hard drive for all .exe files, and then compared their names, sizes, (and to a lesser degree - paths), to a database of known products.

Of course, you could get around that by renaming the file in most cases. But it was highly effective for that company.