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lamcro
Asked: 2010-08-21 13:47:05 +0800 CST

Where can I find an application use history?

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In Windows XP, you can find out how often an installed application was used by going to the Add/Remove Programs section. You can also get an estimate of how often the application was used.

Is there a way to do this in Ubuntu?

package-management software-recommendation software-center

4 Answers

  1. No there's no facility for this that I know of. The closest you could come would be to see how recently files were accessed, but that access could be by any means not just a user running the program. Give this command a try at a shell prompt:

    ls -ltu /bin | less

    On my system it shows which utilities I've used most recently (but it also shows which ones were used most recently in cron jobs and scripts). You could do something similar with the files for a particular application, but it wouldn't be very meaningful.

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  2. Install popularity-contest and run popularity-contest | grep '<OLD>' to find all the relatively unused packages.

    More info on Debian's popcon README

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  3. This sounds like something Gnome Activity Journal (Gnome Zeitgeist) could possibly do. Its supposed to track everything that you do, open files, use apps, browse sites, etc. With the data being captured, a little filtering the data and a nice UI gets you what you'd be looking for.

    Its under development still, unfortunately.

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  4. You might try as well running that command on /usr/bin, since most graphical applications' binaries are installed there.

    ls -ltu /usr/bin | less

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