tailing a file on another server

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

I'm fairly new to bash and linux in general, so how should I form this? 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.

hi,

you can use ssh to do this,

Code:

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ssh yourlogin@remote_server "tail file_name" >> output_file

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Edit- do you wanna create the output_file on the local machine(from where you are running ssh) or on the remote machine? the above command saves the output on the local machine

The local machine is where I want to place this file.

Thanks a lot, what I'm planning on doing is tailing an SMTP log file, then accessing the output via a Java program, searching to ensure a specific email was sent. I plan on executing the ssh line you gave to make the data more easily accessible to my program.