Update:

• I thought you wanted the hashes stored in another file, if that's not the case then have a look at getopt::long for argument passing.
  
  else you can just test argv0:

  if($ARGV[0] eq "first"){
        dump $firsthash;
  }
  [download]

• Disregard above, I got it right the first time... I think?
• Updated the part about a separate conf language for clarification


It seems like it boils down to HOW you are storing your hashes.
If you are only interested in pure data storage, then you might want to have a look at the YAML format. If you want to be able to extend your application and dont care about the computation cost, create a package, load it and export whatever you need.

On the other end of the spectrum (I put this possibility last for a good reason) if you want to use said hashes for configuration purposes but still need some logic to be applied to them (from within so you can have a consistant api and thus blurring the line between configuration files and "proto plugins") you might want to have a look at a specialised language(lua) and its just in time compiler. As it should give you C like performances its something to explore as well. You can even get it to play nice with perl.

Thats it for the doc part, what have you tried? You could easily use the do command after filtering the file content to select what you want to execute, or (cleaner imo) go the package way.

Hope that helps, keep in mind its only my brand of fishing so you might want to keep asking around.

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