I have plenty of softwares installed on my Linux machine (RHEL) and some were installed with yum, some other by downloading a rpm and executed it from gnome file manager. I also have few softwares archives (zip or tar) I just unzipped in the /opt directory.My question is: is it possible to know by which method I installed e.g the chrome browser which is located in /opt/google/ folder?The answer can be different by Linux distro, but I am more interested for these distros: RHEL, CentOS, Fedora (sorted by importance).  The answer is enough for me if I can know: it was installed by yum, rpm or zip. I checked the history (for both my own user and for root) but there is not traces there anymore.
How to find by what means a software has been installed on linux
linux;software installation;command history
rpm -qa --last is an easy way to find out when certain software was installed from RPM. rpm -qf /path/to/some/software is pretty reliable to determine if the software was installed from RPM and which RPM (unless that is a symbolic link).If it wasn't installed by RPM the software came to your system in some other way.Whether of not the RPM package came through a yum repository, or not: yum info <rpm-name> displays from which repository the RPM package is available. If the yum repository is now disabled or the RPM package was installed manually yum will list:  Repo: installed.