Tomthemage wrote: > I'd like to tail a file that's sitting on another server, but simply typing: > > tail address.of.server:/file/to/tail >> output > > doesn't seem to be doing the trick: > > tail: cannot open "address.of.server:/file/to/tail" for reading: No such > file or directory
Right. The tail command is expecting a filename there. You didn't give it a filename. You gave it a string that could be a filename on the local filesystem but probably isn't typical. There is no reason that "address.of.server:" can't be a directory. Try it. You will see that the above is potentially a perfectly good local filename. The tail program doesn't know anything about rcp-like strings such as the above. It only knows about local filesystem filenames. mkdir -p address.of.server:/file/to date -R > address.of.server:/file/to/tail tail address.of.server:/file/to/tail Since tail couldn't open the file on the local filesystem it reported the error. > I'm fairly new to bash and linux in general, so how should I form this? First, this isn't really a bug-bash issue and so this is off-topic for this mailing list. I can't resist trying to help anyway but will keep the response short. You seem to know about ssh because you included the name in your subject line. Why don't you use ssh to access that file? > I know how to access this file normally, and I CAN do this by just > logging onto the server and then typing: > > tail /file/to/tail >> output > > but I, for whatever reason, want to consolidate everything to one statement, > if possible. Try using ssh to access the file. ssh -n example.com tail /file/to/tail >> output That will use ssh without reading stdin to the remote host machine and on the remote host will execute tail of the there file and the stdout will be appended to output on the local filesystem. Note that the appending of the output seems suspicious to me. This will duplicate the lines if the command is run multiple times. Bob
