Careful. You might get nominated for the useless use of cat award, and actually get it.

This is a horrible way of loading configuration

Indeed. Instead of

my $file = '1174639.conf';
my $buf = `cat $file`;
my @conf;
eval( $buf );
[download]

I'd rather say

my @conf = do '1174639.conf';
[download]

since duplicating a static file name into a variable is pointless, as is allocating a buffer to eval a file, and invoking /bin/sh to read it.

update: The award should go to the author of nlpfit, since lines 227-244 read as follows

# set up the @conf array
my(@conf);
if(defined($opt{config_file})){
   
   my($buf);
   $buf = `cat $opt{config_file}`;
   
   # slurp
   if (eval($buf)){
      print STDOUT "$me: Read config from $opt{config_file}\n" if $opt
+{verbose};
      }
   else{
      die "$me: Error reading config from $opt{config_file} (fix it!)\
+n\n";
      }
   }
else{
   @conf = @default_conf;
   }
[download]

and that's where 1nickt got that abomination. It shouldn't have been repeated without correction, though.