Hi,

Is there a programmatic way to get the list of all installed applications on Linux.

Also, how can we get the application activities in Linux OS like running applications name, time of day when they started, duration till the applications were running on system, application version etc.

Is there a way to do this in C/C++.

I am building an app that runs like a daemon and fetches the applications status and sends it to the network admin for him to monitor the application usage pattern on the user computers in the network.

I really appreciate any help, workaround or code snippet.

Thanks a lot..
Arun

"top" would report most of the information you are looking for about currently running processes, how long they have been running, and who ran them.

As for a list of installed software, that is considerably harder. Different distributions have different methods of package management, so you would need to at least support all the major methods. But beyond that, software could be installed from source, or it could have been a binary extracted into the filesystem rather than through an official package (such as Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, etc, etc).