Problem

You want to allow the users of your program to change its behavior through configuration files.

Solution

Either process a file in trivial VAR=VALUE format, setting a hash key-value pair for each setting:

while (<CONFIG>) {
    chomp;                  # no newline
    s/#.*//;                # no comments
    s/^\s+//;               # no leading white
    s/\s+$//;               # no trailing white
    next unless length;     # anything left?
    my ($var, $value) = split(/\s*=\s*/, $_, 2);
    $User_Preferences{$var} = $value;
} 

Or better yet, treat the config file as full Perl code:

do "$ENV{HOME}/.progrc";

Discussion

The first solution lets you read in config files in a trivial format like this (comments and blank lines are allowed):

# set class C net
NETMASK = 255.255.255.0
MTU     = 296
    
DEVICE  = cua1
RATE    = 115200
MODE    = adaptive

After you're done, you can pull in a setting by something like $User_Preferences{"RATE"} to find the value 115200. If you wanted the config file to directly set a variable in your program using that name, instead of assigning to the hash, do this:

no strict 'refs';
$$var = $value;

and the $RATE variable would contain 115200.

The second solution uses do to pull in raw Perl code directly. When used with an expression instead of a block, do interprets the expression as a filename. This is nearly identical to using require, but without risk of taking a fatal exception. In the second format, the config file would look like:

# set class C net
$NETMASK = '255.255.255.0';
$MTU     = 0x128;
# Brent, please turn on the modem
$DEVICE  = 'cua1';
$RATE    = 115_200;
$MODE    = 'adaptive';

If you don't see the point of having extra punctuation and live code, consider this: you can have all of Perl at your disposal. You can now add arbitrary logic and tests to your simple assignments:

if ($DEVICE =~ /1$/) {
    $RATE = 28_800;
} else {
    $RATE = 115_200;
} 

Many programs support system and personal configuration files. If you want the user's choices to override the system ones, load the user file second:

$APPDFLT = "/usr/local/share/myprog";

do "$APPDFLT/sysconfig.pl";
do "$ENV{HOME}/.myprogrc";

If you want to ignore the system config file when the user has their own, test the return value of the do.

do "$ENV{HOME}/.myprogrc";
    or
do "$APPDFLT/sysconfig.pl"

You might wonder what context those files will be executed under. They will be in the same package that do itself was compiled into. Typically you'll direct users to set particular variables, which, being unqualified globals, will end up in the current package. If you'd prefer unqualified variables go into a particular package, do this:

{ package Settings; do "$ENV{HOME}/.myprogrc" }

As with a file read in using require or use, those read in using do count as a separate and unrelated lexical scope. That means the configuration file can't access its caller's lexical (my) variables, nor can the caller find any such variables that might have been set in the file. It also means that the user's code isn't held accountable to a pragma like use strict or use integer that may be in effect in the caller.

If you don't want clean partitioning of variable visibility, you can get the config file's code executed in your own lexical scope. If you have a cat program or its technical equivalent handy, you could write yourself a hand-rolled do:

eval `cat $ENV{HOME}/.myprogrc`;

We've never actually seen anyone (except Larry) use that approach in production code.

For one thing, do is a lot easier to type. Also, it respects the @INC path, which is normally searched if a full path is not specified, but, unlike using a require, no implicit error checking happens under do. This means you don't have to wrap it in an eval to catch exceptions that would otherwise cause your program to die, because do already functions as an eval.

You can still check for errors on your own if you'd like:

$file = "someprog.pl";
unless ($return = do $file) {
    warn "couldn't parse $file: $@"         if $@;
    warn "couldn't do $file: $!"            unless defined $return;
    warn "couldn't run $file"               unless $return;
}

This is much simpler for the programmer to source in code than it would be to invent and then parse a complicated, new syntax. It's also much easier on the user than forcing them to learn the syntax rules of yet another configuration file. Even better, you give the user access to a powerful algorithmic programming language.

One reasonable concern is security. How do you know that the file hasn't been tampered with by someone other than the user? The traditional approach here is to do nothing, trusting the directory and file permissions. Nine times out of ten, this is also the right approach. Most projects just aren't worth being that paranoid over. For those that are, see the next recipe.

See Also

The eval and require functions in perlfunc (1) and in Chapter 3 of Programming Perl; Recipe 8.17; Recipe 10.12