Another possibilty is replacing your cat command with perl -e 'some one liner'. This gets a bit tricky, since you have to double escape the script text (once to pass through the local shell, and once to pass through the remote one). Using Net::SSH to internalize the ssh call to your local perl script helps this a bit. The main drawback is that starting a perl interpreter on the remote system is significantly more expensive than running 'cat' or 'tail'.