[__david__]

I think you want s///g on your second sed... Also that doesn't work in Mac OS X for some reason (their sed doesn't appear to interpret \n in the replacement text). I replaced it with perl to make that part work:

    perl -pe 's/ *\| */\n/g'

I still haven't gotten the whole thing to work yet because my history contains the above history pipeline and so it's splitting the "|" that inside the sed command onto multiple lines which is causing "xargs which" to balk because quotes are not matching or something:

    xargs: unterminated quote

Shells are amazing until spaces or quotes are involved! :-)

[ColinWright]

Yes, I've inserted the "g" in the appropriate sed commands. Thanks - good catch.

Some systems seem to require \r instead of \n - I know vim's behavior differs from sed's in this, so that might be an issue.

With xargs balking, you can throw the error stream at that point, for convert it to a loop over the alleged commands:

    for c in $( long thing before the xargs )
    do
        which $c
    done \
    | long thing after the xargs.

Specifically:

    for f in $( \
        history                      \
            | sed "s/^[0-9 ]*//"     \
            | sed "s/ *| */\n/g"     \
            | awk '{print $1}'       \
        )
    do
        which $f 2> /dev/null
    done                         \
        | sed "s.^/usr.."        \
        | grep ^.bin             \
        | sed "s/^.*\///"        \
        | sort                   \
        | uniq -c                \
        | sort -rn               \
        > commands.txt

And yes spaces are a pig, and can lead to all sorts of ambiguities that don't have reasonable ways of resolving them, especially in filenames.

[__david__]

"\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

[NyxWulf]

This works for me in zsh on OSX

history \ | sed "s/^[0-9 ]//" \ | perl -pe 's/ \| */\n/g' \ | gawk '{counts[$1] += 1} END { for (x in counts) { print counts[x],x}}' OFS="\t" \ | column -t \ | sort -k 1,1nr \ | head -100

Ok not sure how to format this on HN https://gist.github.com/nyxwulf/5608955#file-gistfile1-sh

[lobotryas]

From what I recall to represent s newline in sed on osx you need to add an actual carriage return.

Take the poster's script above and copy it to a text file. Now replace \n with a new line, save and it should run.