Regarding not wanting to write your own parser, it's actually not that bad. I have a little one that I've been using for small config files for awhile; nothing fancy but it works:

sub readConfigFile($){
    my $cfgfile = shift;
    my %cfg;
    open(CONFIG, $cfgfile) or die " Error opening $cfgfile: $!\n";
    while (<CONFIG>) {
        next if /^\s*$/;
        next if /^\#/;
        chomp;
        next unless /=/;
        my ($key, $variable) = split(/=/,$_,2);
        $variable =~ s/(\$(\w+))/$cfg{$2}/g;
        $cfg{$key} = $variable;
    }
    return %cfg;
}
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In my opinion, this is a nifty and simple little config file parser.