do FILE; returns the value of the last statement in FILE, so globalizing things isn't really necessary. That property can be used to restrict visibility of the configuration:

$ cat foo.conf
my %conf = (
    passwd => 'joe',
    uname => 'joe',
    foo => 1,
);
\%conf;
$ perl -w -Mstrict -e 'BEGIN{my $conf = do "foo.conf";sub whisper {pri
+nt $conf->{passwd},$/}} whisper()'
joe
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Attempts to make use of $conf outside the BEGIN block will fail.

After Compline,
Zaxo