See Object Serialization Basics for a few pointers, but it might be easier to use CGI.pm's (alt.) own save() and restore_paramaters() functions, along with your open() and flock()s.

  --k.

Say you have written the numbers to the file and have delimited them with | so the data in the file looks like this:

1111|2222|3333

You can then read them into your variables like so:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

# declare your variables
my $varFile = "variables.txt";
my ($var1,$var2,$var3);

# open the file
open DATA, $varFile or die "Can't open file: $!";
  while (<DATA>) {
# chomp the line
    chomp;
# split the line into values and assign them to your variables
    ($var1,$var2,$var3) = split /\|/;
  }
# close the file
close DATA;
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The length of the code can be reduced substantially, but this gives you an idea of what's going on.

use Storable;
store \%hash, 'data';
$hr = retrieve 'data';
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I quite often provide Perl apps compiled into executables with perl2exe for deployment on systems without Perl installed. As such I always provide a back-door means by which the configuration can be adjusted e.g.: -

use strict;
my $cake = 'chocolate';
my $pie = 'apple';
eval slurp("config.pl");
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## slurp - read a file into a scalar or list
sub slurp {
    my $file = shift;
    local *F;
    open F, "< $file" or die "Error opening '$file' for read: $!";
    if(not wantarray){
        local $/ = undef;
        my $string = <F>;
        close F;
        return $string;
    }
    local $/ = "";
    my @a = <F>;
    close F;
    return @a;
}
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$pie = 'pecan';
cake = 'fairy';
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If you are interested in errors from the eval, it can be followed by something like...

if($@){
    print "Some errors happened...\n\n";
    print $@."\n\n";
    print "Oh well...\n";
}
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Here's what I use in my scripts. Say you have a text file named "config.txt" that looks like this:

# This is my configuration file
variable1=111
variable2=222
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I put this sub into my script to read that data back in:

sub GetSetting
{
my ($cfg_value,$cfg_filename,$cfg_default)=@_;
open(CFGFILE,"<$cfg_filename") or die "Can't open configuration file $
+cfg_filename.";
my @cf=<CFGFILE>;
foreach $cfg_line (@cf)
{
if (index($cfg_line,"#")==0) { next; } # Lines starting with a hash ma
+rk are comments
my @ln=split("=",$cfg_line);
if ($ln[0] =~ /$cfg_value/i) {
chomp $ln[1];
return $ln[1];
}
}
close CFGFILE;
return $cfg_default; # Return default if we can't find the value 
}
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You set the default value when you call the sub. To read the setting back in, just do like so:

Depending on how you output the data, it could be read back by using a require (or preferably eval).

# save stuff
print FILE '$myvar = ' . $myvar . ";\n";

# saving
print FILE "myvar = $myvar\n";
print FILE "anothervar = $anothervar\n";

# retrieving
while (<FILE>) {
  if (/^(\w+) *= *(.+)$/) {
     ${$1} = $2;
  }
}