How can I know what is installed

[PaulS]

I've a system that has one or more of the following installed on it "I think".

Jira, Confluence, maven, groovy, grapes, clover, and quiet possibly more.

How can I find out definititively what is installed on the PC? Is there a command, menu, gui, anything where I can look and see whats installed and what version is install?

[J. Caldwell]

I would also take a look at the system environment path...that will tell you some things and give you their install locations (and maybe even their versions).

[PaulS]

This system is inherited and am looking to upgrade the hardware, which is why we're trying to discover everything on the system that needs to be ported to the new one. Was hoping someone had put togther a gui that would identify these non-standard installs, but as you said, I'm stuck performing a file system search and guessing what is needed based on site. I do appreciate your input, at least I've been able to talk with someone to get options from.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yeah, inherited systems can be a right old pain (especially if you're left with no documentation, or they've decided to do things differently from what the docs generally say).

One other trick that might help - not sure if windows actually has this, but in Unix boxes, "netstat" is a pretty standard command, often installed by default.

With the right switches, it'll dump a list of the "ports" on your system that software is "listening" on, and it'll list the software executables. As an example, on one of my linux boxes, "netstat -plant" tells me I've got a couple of Tomcats listening on 8090 and 8100 (Jira and Confluence), a SQL process on 1543, Apache on 443, and so-on.

That should help you with the *services* it's running for external users (i.e. all the stuff that users treat the machine as a server for). Won't help with maven or groovy though - they've been installed to support other things on the box...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Depends on the operating system AND the methods of installation.

General principles are

Check the package managers (the system the operating system provides for add/remove/maintain software)

Check the usual places people put stuff they install outside the package manager

Look at the currently running process list to see what else is running

There's no real way we can tell you more than the general principles (I'm not going to assume PC = Windows, because there are nearly 20 PCs in this house and only 1 of them is running Windows)

[PaulS]

Thank you for the advice. Currently the PC is running Windows XP. The trouble is that "Jira, Confluence, maven, groovy, grapes, clover, and quiet possibly more" do not sho up in the Windows package manager, i.e., Control Panels Add/Remove Programs. I will take your advice and look at running processes to assist me with getting further. As for normal places of putting things on the PC, there does not seem to be a pattern or normal place. So I am left with trying to guess what things from those applications types are out there. All the normal windows intalled programs show up in the Control Panels Add/Remove Programs panel, just not any of the items like "Jira, Confluence, maven, groovy, grapes, clover, and quiet possibly more" as they don't seem to follow normal windows install paths.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I suspect there's not a lot more you can do than a search of the file system. Generallyl on most OS's, I tend to create or use one standard directory to do the installations of non-packaged software, but if you've not done something like that, or you're inheriting a system from someone else who doesn't do that, you're a bit stuck. A file system search is probably your only option.