Patent ID: 8539445

Claim:
A method for generating a product signature, and using the product signature to detect presence of an associated software product on file systems of a plurality of data processing systems, said method comprising: scanning the file systems of the plurality of data processing systems to detect occurrences of sets of files, each of the sets being indicative of one or more versions of said product installed on a data processing system; for each of the sets, collecting at least one element of registry information for use in verifying each of said sets; determining a corresponding product signature being associated to a software product, the signature including a file-based portion indicative of the set of files and a registry-based portion being indicative of at least one element of registry information, said registry-based portion including a value of at least one predefined registry key associated with a version among said one or more versions of the product installed on the data processing system; determining the value of said at least one predefined registry key; and in response to detecting each of the sets, using said value of said at least one predefined registry key to verify the file-based portion of each of said sets and determine the version of the product based on the value of said at least one predefined registry key; wherein scanning the file systems of the plurality of data processing systems for detecting the occurrence, further comprises: identifying a plurality of executable files on the plurality of data processing systems; creating a list containing the plurality of identified executable files; selecting at least one file on the list; and for each selected file, creating a footprint set that identifies files installed as part of said software product, the footprint set including the files which occur in all folders containing the selected file; wherein the file-based portion includes said footprint set.