My first thought is, "no, you're probably not using the right tools for what you want to do."

I would attempt the whole thing in Perl for starters. Have a look at opendir, readdir and closedir along with grep for finding the compressed tar archives you want to work with and placing the names in an array. Having found them I would then loop over them using CPAN modules to uncompress (Compress::Bzip2) and read (Archive::Tar) the archives. I would read each file in the archive into a string so that I could do as many or as few matches as I wanted.

I should stress that I have never done anything like this before but I think you are more likely to meet with success by adopting this approach. I hope these thoughts will help you towards a solution but feel free to ask further if things aren't clear.

Cheers,

JohnGG