this question garnered a fair amount of interest and I appreciate the replies.

In what way (what did you decide)?

I decided to stay with what I have (because the scalar variables are used all over the program and I didn't want to do a great deal of editing). However, next time I have this situation I will most likely use:

for (qw / server database user password ... initversion /) {
     help() and last unless (defined $cfg->params($_) and $cfg->params
+($_));
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and use $cfg->params(server) instead of $server Thanks to all (Perl Monks is fantastic!)

however, this approach does not allow

$mail_host          = $cfg->param('mail_host') || 'mail@xxx.org';
$support_addr       = $cfg->param('support_addr') || 'support@xxx.org'
+;
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default values.