in reply to need understanding

I may be way off target - but if you are coming to Perl from a shell scripting language, you will be happy to know that environment variables are conveniently available from the %ENV hash. Try this out: 
while (my($key,$val) = each %ENV) {
  print "$key => $val\n";
}

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If this is not what you need, then please be more specific.

UPDATE:
The 'HOME' key contains the path to a user's home dir, the 'USERNAME' contains the user's username, but you can't get their password from the EVIRONMENT - that would be BAD BAD BAD! Think about it.

UPDATE2:
If you are looking for a configuration file like perrin suggested below, check out How to assign a variable with a value read from a config file.

jeffa

"You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose."

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Re: (jeffa) Re: need understanding
by dreman (Acolyte) on Nov 30, 2001 at 22:32 UTC
    Sorry for the lack of information, but what I'm looking for is to pull set variables in my perl script. Like in KSH . .environment_file to prevent hard coding paths and passwords. Hope this gives more. Thanks.
[reply]
      It sounds like you want a configuration file. There are tons of ways to do that in perl. Try searching for configuration or config, or check out some of the stuff on CPAN, like AppConfig.
[reply]
      You could login to the account with that initialization file then start your perl script and get with %ENV as shown above. I don't know if there's a generic shell-initialization-file parsing CPAN module. Or if it's like .bashrc, maybe look on equals signs like /PATH=['"]?(\w+)/, though that's not a good solution in my opinion.
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