So you want to know what software you have installed on your FreeBSD system, or you want to check if you have a particular piece of software installed? This is a pretty simple task.
To list all software packages (this includes those installed through Ports and those installed through Packages) installed on your system, issue the following command:
pkg_info
This will produce a very long list of applications/utilities and information about them.
To check to see if you have a particular app installed on your system, we can search the package database, including all or part of the application name in the search. If we wanted to check to see if we had OpenOffice.org installed, for example, we could try:
pkg_info | grep openoffice
What if you wanted to broaden your search a little? Try this:
pkg_info | grep office
Same result on my system. What if you want to broaden your search even further?
pkg_info | grep open
On my system that returns "en-US-openoffice.org-2.0.0", "open-motif-2.2.3_2", as well as a number of descriptions from other packages that contain the word "open".
Get the idea? Use this tool wisely.