I'd have to say that the "easiest" way would be to just have a perl file that you 'require' into your program. The config would look like $attr = "value"; $this = 0;

I found the following method to be simple and readable in terms of configuration file syntax:

TOKEN1=value1
TOKEN2=value2
...
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while(<>) {
  if (/^([A-Z_]+)=(.*)/) {
     my ($TAG,$VAL)=($1,$2);
     $conf{$1}=$2;
  }
}
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%conf=(TOKEN1 => "value1",
       TOKEN2 => "value2")
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Personally, I've found the following setup to be the easiest :

I have a routine, readconfig(), which takes a string as the parameter (the name of the configuration file). A template configuration file, filled with sane defaults, is stored in the __DATA__ section of my program. Readfile reads the data either from the file specified, or, if the name is empty, from the __DATA__ section. I call readconfig() twice, once to initialize with the sane defaults, and then again with the name of the config file (if given), to overwrite the settings differing from the defaults.

Of course, this answer dosen't help you with how to organize your configuration data, but the configuration data depends much on what your program does (and what data it needs) and what your audience is. Apache for example uses some kind of HTML/XML style to store the configuration. I prefer either .ini style sections with name=value pairs or simple name=value pairs.

     I like my configuration file to be written in perl, so I can have common functions which can be used between my programs.
   I start like this...

use lib ("/path/to/file/config");
use PerlConfig;  # This is PerlConfig.pm in /path/to/file/config
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package Cfg;
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I would take a look at App::Config on CPAN by Andy Wardley (author id: ABW)

Three modules on CPAN, (one which is already mentioned above, but is now called something else):

• Config::General
• AppConfig::File
• Config::Tiny

Config::General is part of the bigger Config-General module, and AppConfig is the parent of AppConfig::File

They both read configuration files that are in the standard format that you would expect, but give you many, many options.

HTH.

Here's a way to have multiple config files for a single script. They're specified with a query such as myscript.pl?config1, myscript.pl?config2, etc.

$config=$ENV{QUERY_STRING};
unless(require $config){
  print "No Configuration File Specified!\n";
  exit;
}
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