"\r" doesn't work either. It's just not interpreting those kind of escapes. I get lines like this: historyrsed "s/^[0-9 ]*//"rsed 's/ *r*/\r/g'rless The f

"\r" doesn't work either. It's just not interpreting those kind of escapes. I get lines like this: historyrsed "s/^[0-9 ]*//"rsed 's/ *r*/\r/g'rless The for loop is a good idea, though I prefer the "while read" idiom since it fits in with the pipeline better: ... | awk '{print $1}' \ | while read line; do which $line; done \ ... That finally works for me. Here's the whole thing: history \ | sed "s/^[0-9 ]*//" \ | perl -pe 's/ *\| */\n/g' \ | awk '{print $1}' \ | while read line; do which $line; done \ | sed "s.^/usr.." \ | grep ^.bin \ | sed "s/^.*\///" \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | sort -rn