Let me elaborate a bit on what I'm doing. A web application kicks off a backend process. It's this backend process that does all the scp activity. For instance, scp of a huge tar file. What I'd like to do is have my web application be able to ask the backend, "So, how's it coming along?" I figure if scp was dumping its progress into a file, I could display that log file back to the user of the web application.