Is this your actual code? You'll probably want to chomp that date because it's coming with a newline with messes up the grep. Even better would be doing that directly in Perl. :)

The backticks are a double-quoted context, so variables interpolate. Ensure you're getting what you think you're getting by changing the backticks to a print.

print qq(grep $date $ENV{JBOSS_HOME}/log/wrapper.log | grep "$find sta
+rted");
[download]