>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