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The monitoring of leaks in pipelines is an important issue to be addressed by researchers and the public. This is due the fact that they can have a great impact both economically and environmentally. In recent years, the effect of leakages of pipelines carrying oil, gas and nuclear fluids have posed a threat on humans as well as marine life. This paper provides a survey of recent methods of detecting pipeline leaks with special focus on software based methods. These methods include negative pressure wave, mass/volume balance, pressure point analysis, real time transient modeling, statistical methods as well as methods that employing digital signal processing. This paper also surveys some of the recent research attempts that focus on the employment of wireless sensor networks for leak detection and present research challenges that can be encountered in such environments.