Here's a naieve implementation based on a hash lookup and a regexp.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
my %tokens= ( 'general-scheduledb' => 'e:\users\dbush\schedule.db',
              'animal-type' => 'mammal',
              'species' => 'camel',
            );
my $inistring='start2=schedule.exe;schedule "localhost:%general-schedu
+ledb%";NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS;%species%';
$inistring =~ s/%([^%]+)%/$tokens{$1}/eg;
print $inistring;
__END__
start2=schedule.exe;schedule "localhost:e:\users\dbush\schedule.db";NO
+RMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS;camel
[download]

I fudged your example string a bit to more clearly illustrate the approach.

Note that this is a naieve implementation - you'll have to add checking that all tokens exist (as this code does not catch typo's in the ini file) for example.

Update: Renamed %values hash to %tokens. Naming a hash values is asking for a headache :).

Also, I missed the part that your token values are in the ini file as well. That means that using my implementation, you would build the %tokens hash from the [general] (or whichever) part of your ini file. However, you probably should start looking at modules for this, as jenda suggests below.

CU
Robartes-