List of installed programs

This shows how to get list of installed programs on Windows machines.

Thanks to this blog entry (and one comment below) I learned about existence of nice tool shipped by default with Windows installation - wmic (Windows Management Instrumentation Command).

It can gather various types of information from your workstation, like example below. Running this from command-line get you list of all installed programs with their version, separated by tab.

wmic product list /format:csv.xsl | perl -F, -lanE "say qq{$F[1]\t$F[10]}"

Part by part. wmic product list /format:csv.xsl returns list of programs installed, formatted with csv.xsl XSLT template. Output is like this:

Node,Description,IdentifyingNumber,InstallDate,....
BVR,Mobipocket Reader 6.2,{342126E1-173C-4585-.....

The columns are:

[ 0] Node
[ 1] Description
[ 2] IdentifyingNumber
[ 3] InstallDate
[ 4] InstallLocation
[ 5] InstallState
[ 6] Name
[ 7] PackageCache
[ 8] SKUNumber
[ 9] Vendor
[10] Version

So next part is running perl one-liner, processing this csv. Since there is not much escaping we can safely split line on comma (-F, switch), process each line with code specified on command-line (-nE switch) with automatic removing of trailing newlines (-la switch).

The code is just printing column 1 with description and column 10 with version separated by tab. Note that Windows does not support single quoting, so I had to use qq synonym to quotes in perl code.