>The retrieve and restore functions both support the filelist option, which >specifies a file containing a list of file names to be restored. I have >used this option with restores. The resulting tape mount requests indicated >that the files in the list were sorted by location and restored in an order >that minimized tape movement (as far as I can tell, this behavior is not >spelled out anywhere in the TSM documentation, and can only be discovered >by experiment). I have never had occasion to use the filelist option with >a retrieve operation, but I suspect that it will cause sorting by location >in that context as well.
The one doc reference regarding filelist processing order that I've seen is in the TSM 4.2 Technical Guide redbook which introduced the option: Processing performance The entries in the filelist are processed in the order they appear in the filelist. For optimal processing performance, you should pre-sort the filelist by filespace name and path. I haven't seen any amendment of that statement, but things can certainly change without notice, and much time has passed since 4.2. Richard Sims http://people.bu.edu/rbs
