List installed applications

list applications

list packages

( rather than programs )
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

list programs

list the executables in your $PATH, which can be done using bash’s compgen:

compgen -c

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

search for an app :

compgen -c  | grep 'hex' 

desktop applications

in your start menu, try:

ls /usr/share/applications | awk -F '.desktop' ' { print $1}' -