Actually, grep a* is not going to produce the right resultant for 2 reasons:
1. The shell will automatically expand a* to match any filenames in the current working directory which won't produce a meaningful result.
2. a* matches the letter a anywhere in the filename, not just the first character, and the filename is located at the end of the tar -tvf listing.
You'll need to extract the filename portion fromn the tar output using something like awk, then extract the basename of the file itself (in case there are leading directories stored on the tape) and finally, anchor the search to the begining of the filename as in:
tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m | awk '{print $NF}' | while read MYFILE;do echo $(basename $MYFILE) | grep ^a ; done
Test this command with other letters like ^b or ^s to see that it produces the desired result. Note that tar, unlike fbackup and other commercial tools, has no central index dso the entire tape must be read to get an index. You might want to grab the index in one command and sort the result into a file for easy scanning:
tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m | awk '{print $NF}' | sort > /var/tmp/filenames
(sorts using full pathname)
tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m | awk '{print $NF}' | while read MYFILE;do echo $(basename $MYFILE) | sort > /var/tmp/filenames
(sorts by the filename only)
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
