Your "pure-perl" alternative is not exactly equivalent to the OP. First, by default "awk" splits on white-space, just like the default behavior of "split" (so you shouldn't be splitting on commas). Second, if "$file" contains multiple lines that match $vals[0], the OP's backtick version will return a string with multiple lines, whereas your code will only return at most a single line. (Oh, and why do you have "my $val" a second time?) To replicate the "grep | awk" pipeline properly, the sub would actually be simpler:

sub getvalue
{ 
   my ($file, $val) = @_;

   my $f = new IO::File $file, "r" or die "Can not open $file: $!";
   my $matched = '';

   while (<$f>)
   {
      $matched .= (split)[1] . "\n" if (/$val/);
   }
   return $matched;
}
[download]