toolic and perlfan have given you some pointers. There are a couple of slight oddities in your code. Leaving aside whether to shell out to /bin/date and /bin/touch, changing the order of your statements would save some redundancy.

$stamp=`/bin/date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`;
$file="/u01/scripts/logs/$stamp.tapes";
`/bin/touch $file`;
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Later on you do

$media_list=`/bin/cat /u01/scripts/logs/$file`;
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so you are cat'ing the file "/u01/scripts/logs//u01/scripts/logs/$stamp.tapes" which is probably not what you intended.

I hope this helps you.

Cheers,

JohnGG