You could always change the PERL grep for the system grep by using the backticks operator as follows (beginning of your code omitted):

...

    foreach my $item (@cqafiles)
    {
        
        my $status_line = `grep '^CQA_STATUS' $item`;
                
        print FILE "$status_line\n";
        
    }
    
    close(FILE) || die "can't close$cqapath/CQA_STATUS after writing\n
+";
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