Ok so I rewrote the sub letting perl handle the work rather than system calls.

This is a bit sloppy I admit. But it is a working solution to the issues. Keep in mind this is feeding a CGI script on a system I do not have access to. All the output is displayed to the user via a web browser. Please comment on any clean up.

#####
sub tail_file {
my $node = shift;
my $name="/var/log/syslog";
my $x = -1;
        if ($node =~ /all nodes/i){
                $x = 15;
        }
print "<h2>Tailing /var/log/syslog...</h2><br>\n";
  use File::Tail;
  my $file=File::Tail->new(name=>$name, tail=>$x);
  while (defined(my $line=$file->read)) {

        if ($node =~ /all nodes/i) {
                print "$line<br>\n";
        }else{
                my @line2 = grep {/$node/i} $line;
                foreach my $line3 (@line2) {
                chomp $line3;
                $line3 =~ s/\s/$space/g;
                print "$line3<br>\n";
                }
        }

  }

}

#####
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