while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
done < `tail -f /var/log/messages`

This looks like homework----please tell us the context of the question---ie what are you trying to do?

AND: FIX WHAT???? You have not told us what is broken!!!!

It doesn't seem like homework to me or he'd have been told not to use backticks.

I knew that either piping it through the front or using process substitution would work (forgot about here strings), but was having a hard time verbalizing why what he was doing was an 'ambiguous redirect' and found this, which says it pretty well:

http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.co...output-to.html

If this is homework, sorry, but maybe you'll still learn something and the loop above surely can't be a very significant part of your homework.

Anyway, I don't know how new you are (welcome to LQ, btw), but three notes on the 'facepalm' level: you're going to have to have read permission to that file, of course, and you'll need to wait for it to get appended to to see any changes after the initial output and there's no way to exit except ^C. But I assumed you meant the redirection issue.