tar: extract with wildcards missleading

[mrq1]

the extracting of multiple files from a tar file doesnt work as
expected:

$ touch a{a,b,c,d} b{a,b}

wildcard adding of files is ok:

$ tar cfa test.tar.bz2 a* b*
$ rm a* b*

$ tar xfa test.tar.bz2 "b*"
tar: Pattern matching characters used in file names. Please,
tar: use --wildcards to enable pattern matching, or --no-wildcards to
tar: suppress this warning.
tar: b*: Not found in archive
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

it looks like i need the "--wildcards" option for doing this

$ tar --wildcards xfa test.tar.bz2 "b*"
tar: You must specify one of the `-Acdtrux' options
Try `tar --help' or `tar --usage' for more information.

but this is not true

$ tar --wildcards -xfa test.tar.bz2 "b*"
tar: a: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

$ tar --wildcards -xa test.tar.bz2 "b*"

simply hangs and does nothing :(

expected behavior:
$ tar xfa test.tar.bz2 "b*"
ba
bb

like any other file-archiving program

if this is not tar compliant, there should be at least an
--extractasexpected option to enable this feature!

[Morpheus (morpheus17.pro)]

On Ubuntu 9.04, it works using this method:

tar -xf file.tar --wildcards "*a"

However, according to man page of tar, --wildcards are enabled by default:

--wildcards
    use wildcards when excluding files (the default)

It also doesn't works with -X, you must type --exclude "*b"