This is pretty nifty. I would suggest, though, that you allow for anagrams. Simple example, because I haven't had my coffee yet this morning and I don't have the brain power to thing of a longer anagram: evil, vile and live have the same letters. Yes, I guess the people who write the jumble probably make sure there's only one solution, but just in case you might want your lookup table to be a hash of arrays:

#option -u(nscramble) ...
if($opt_u){
    #open default if not specified
    open(IN, $opt_d ? "<$opt_d" : "<$database");
    
    #build the lookup table
    while(<IN>){
        ($value, $key) = split /:/;
        chomp $key;
        push @{$hash{$key}}, $value; # each hash value is an arrayref
    }
    
    #arange the letters to match format of database
    $sorted = join "",sort split//,$opt_u;
    
    #display unscrambled word
    print join ', ', @{$hash{$sorted}} , "\n"; 
}
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LAI
:eof