[kosma]

In a typical UNIX fashion, there's a program that runs programs:

  ping 127.0.0.1 | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | xargs -d'\n' -n1 say

[masklinn]

-d is a GNU extension, won't work on OSX (short of having installed and running GNU xargs), and it's not needed either in this case.

And `sed -e <command>` is redundant, `-e` is used to specify multiple commands.