larryk, you can read a __DATA__ that is in another file.
Imagine you have a perl module called Store_Config.pm,
which has some information in it's __DATA__ tags that
you need to read. If you know the namespace that the __DATA__
handle is in, you can do this to read it:
use strict;
use Store_Config;
use Symbol qw(qualify_to_ref);
#Pull the reference to the __DATA__ handle
my $fh = qualify_to_ref(DATA => 'Store_Config');
#$fh can now be acted on like a file handle
read($fh, my $config, -s $fh);
print "Store_Config.pm's __DATA__ content is: [$config]\n";