Luminous InfraRed Galaxies (LIRGs) in the local universe are known to be highly interacting galaxies with strong star-formation in obscured environments. LIRGs have diversity in terms of morphology and mode and location of SF, while their even more energetic counterparts, the Ultra-Luminous IR galaxies, ULIRGs, (LIR ≥ 10^12 Lsol ) are normally (remnants of) gas rich major mergers with centralised starbursts and AGN. I will present ongoing work on a survey of >40 (U)LIRGs, in a distance range of 40 to 300Mpc, observed with SALT/RSS in long-slit mode. The sample of galaxies are in various stages of interaction and merging, some with strong AGN contribution. The reduction of the SALT/RSS data, was performed efficiently with our custom-built pipeline written in python/iraf/pyraf and handles error-frames propagation. We are performing a rigorous stellar populations analysis of our sample using Starlight (Cid Fernandes, 2005) which will ultimately lead to understanding the star formation history of these galaxies. We also use automatic line intensity measurements to derive chemical abundances, star formation rates, metallicity and emission line diagnostic. The talk will showcase the latest results that we just obtained for this dataset and discuss some of the future works.