[HOWTO] List your installed applications

[gatorparrots]

AppleSystemProfiler | grep Applications >> ~/installedApps.txt

It launches the GUI version of Apple System Profiler, but then it pipes the results of the "Applications" tab through a grep seach and then outputs the result to a text file in your home directory. Simple and clean. (Leave off the '>> ~/installedApps.txt' if you want it to output directly to the shell and not to a text file.)

One caveat: the above code will just find what is in your /Applications directory.

To search your drive for Cocoa apps, do this:
sudo find / -name "*.app" >> ~/CocoaApps.txt

The last approach is slower, but will find and list all applications in /Applications, whether they are Carbon or Cocoa. (AppleScript authored by pmccann at forums.macosxhints.com):

-- Configure this if necessary: exclude_dirs is just a list
-- of directory names (within starting_dir) that the script 
-- should not examine for applications. If you don't have any
-- directories that need excluding you can set exclude_dirs to {} 
-----------------------------------------
set starting_dir to (path to the startup disk as string) & "Applications:"
set exclude_dirs to {}
-----------------------------------------
on getapps(given_dir)
	global app_list, exclude_dirs
	tell application "Finder"
		if the name of folder given_dir is in exclude_dirs then
			set inside_this to {} --just empty it out
		else
			set mylist to (every file of folder given_dir whose file type is "APPL")
			repeat with filex in mylist
				set app_list to app_list & the POSIX path of (filex as alias)
			end repeat
			set inside_this to every folder of folder given_dir
		end if
	end tell
	repeat with another_dir in inside_this
		getapps(another_dir as alias)
	end repeat
end getapps
global applist, exclude_dirs
set app_list to {}
getapps(starting_dir)
return app_list