La trahison des mots

Run this in your (POSIX-compliant) shell — I promise it’s not bad:

echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'

No seriously though folks, that’s my favorite code joke.¹

This formation uses the “extended regex” option of GNU sed so I could use the |: another pipe, and it means there’s only one s/// operation. With basic regexes I guess it’d be:

echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -e 's/eci n//' -e 's/pas //'

1. Close second is: “What’s the best thing about UDP jokes? No one cares if you don’t get it!” …third is “Knock knock. Race condition. Who’s there?” ↩