in reply to Perl, sort of Unix/system archaeology question

In addition to the excellent answers already given, rpm gives you some pretty good info:

for i in `rpm -qa`; do rpm -qi ${i}; done
Custom apps are often stored in /usr/local/bin, sometimes in /opt/(package), and not very often in /usr(package). And there's the odd package that wants a user created so its software can live under /home. :)

Good luck.

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