"\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