I *think* I know what you're after. You want something like:

slurp "my_other_stuff";
[download]

and then all the other stuff, variables, functions etc are directly accessable inside you program. right? Well, there isn't anything directly like that, and further, most would counsider something like that bad(tm). But, here is what perl does have.

First I'd suggest reading perldoc perlmod and perldoc perlboot to get an idea of how packages and objects work in perl. I'll throw a quick example at you to get you rolling.

# here is my file of common stuff
package my_stuff; # this tells perl how to name this collection of thi
+ngs

sub my_function {
   # stuff
}

1;  # this let's perl know that the package has loaded ok.
[download]

Now in your other program(s) you can say:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use my_stuff;   # this will look for a package named "my_stuff.pm" in 
+the directories listed in @INC

my_stuff::my_function($arg1,$arg2);
[download]

You have to tell perl which package to find my_function in, thus the 'my_stuff::' part. There is a way to get variables too, but it's considered bad design. :)

This is a *very* simplified example, but I hope this helps.

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"