Detecting Installed Softwares on PC

sanPerl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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

Comment on Detecting Installed Softwares on PC

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Detecting Installed Softwares on PC by puploki (Hermit) on Oct 04, 2005 at 12:26 UTC
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.	[reply]
Re^2: Detecting Installed Softwares on PC by sanPerl (Friar) on Oct 05, 2005 at 08:45 UTC
Dear Monks, Thanks a lot for the suggestions. It seems that my problem would solve, if I try all these methods Sandeep	[reply]
Re: Detecting Installed Softwares on PC by gargle (Chaplain) on Oct 04, 2005 at 12:06 UTC
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... -- if ( 1 ) { $postman->ring() for (1..2); }	[reply]
Re: Detecting Installed Softwares on PC by castaway (Parson) on Oct 04, 2005 at 12:11 UTC
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.	[reply]
Re: Detecting Installed Softwares on PC by steelrose (Scribe) on Oct 04, 2005 at 12:18 UTC
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. If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish he will buy an ugly hat. If you talk about fish to a starving man, you're a consultant.	[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom