Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a jailbroken ipad acting as a window sign. It is running an app I wrote that plays a video over and over. Sometimes it stops working, so I set up a log to the device that I can read. I would like to get an alert when the log shows that the player has stopped working. I have openSSH set up on the iPad, and I can successfully connect and see that the log file exists. However, "tail" does not exist on iPad, so I can't tail the log. I have to actually copy the file to my local machine before I can read it. SO...

Is it possible to use tail on my system to read a remote file? Something like:

Code:

tail -f "ssh root@ipad /path/to/log/logfile.log"

Thanks!

No, but you can write a tail or poll the tail. tail -f just keeps trying, sleeping, trying. Keep a shadow copy with tee and tail past that many characters and then sleep in a loop.