Using grep() to subset lines of text

I have two vectors, a and b. b is a text file. I want to find in b those
elements of a which occur at the beginning of the line in b. I have the
following code, but it only returns a value for the first value in a, but I
want both. Any ideas please.


a = c(2,3)

b = NULL
b[1] = "aaa 2 aaa"
b[2] = "2 aaa"
b[3] = "3 aaa"
b[4] = "aaa 3 aaa"

grep(paste("^",a, sep=""), b )