I'm wanting to list ALL installed software on a Solaris 10 system, have tried pkginfo but that just shows what's bundled with Solaris. I saw a suggestion elsewhere regarding viewing the product registry on Solaris -- if anyone knows how to do that or can suggest another approach, please inform!

Product registry is more of a Windows thing. There is indeed one with Solaris but you'll find there a subset of what pkginfo will report, not a superset.
It is incorrect to tell pkginfo only report Solaris bundled software. It reports all software installed using the Solaris standard SVR4 packaging format. Many freeware and some commercial software comply with it. Unfortunately, not all software comes under this format. When it is just a tarball or similar extracted somewhere, there is no definitive heuristic to identify what is installed and where. That would be the same issue with any OS by the way.

Dear jlliagre,

Thank you very much for the clarification re pkginfo output and the use of SunOS/Solaris product registry. IMHO it seems that not having a straightforward way to get a comprehensive list of installed software is a glaring omission in system administration functionality. Folks who inherit administration of systems where a record of installations has not been maintained may find it challenging to identify what's installed.

Any suggestions on how to best approach a comprehensive identification of installed software on a Solaris 10 system will be much appreciated!

Thanks again!

There is no comprehensive way with any OS I'm aware of. Installing a software might simply be copying a single executable file somewhere in a directory. How would you want the OS to guess this file is a new application that matters and should be recorded and not the side effect of an existing program ? Even the notion of software is fuzzy. It has a meaning in term of packaging but doesn't necessarily has one for the OS.

any solaris package that was installed using the pkgadd will have entries in /var/sadm/pkg and this is shown via pkginfo or pkginfo -l for longer listing. If applications were installed using tar or bin files then more often than not these dont populate the pkg database and therefore do not appear in /var/sadm/pkg.

pkginfo | grep application gives all the applications installed on the Solaris box

Welcome to LQ !
It won't list all of them, as already explained in this very thread.

The only surefire way I can think of is ls /usr/bin followed by ls /usr/sbin and perhaps by ls /opt.

I doubt it's worth the effort, as those commands would list every single little thing, including ls.

In Windows World, inventory programs were created to search for pirate software and license violations, which are not much of an issue in open source, where an insignificant percentage of software is commercially licensed.