I've been working way too many hours to see this clearly. Here's what's not working so well, so far... Ok, let's see if I can format this correctly:

___DATA___
MY_DIR=~/temp/module
export MY_DIR
MY_BIN=$MY_DIR/bin
MY_DATA=$MY_DIR/data
export MY_BIN MY_DATA

__temp.pl__
#! /usr/local/bin/perl
require "testpack.pm";
testpack::import();
print "DIR $DIR\n";

__testpack.pm__
package testpack;
sub import {
  $conf_file = "conf.sh";
  open (FILE, $conf_file) || die "Cant open file. \n";
  while (<FILE>) {
    if (! (/^\W/ || /^export/)) {  # ign. cmnts & ws
      chomp;

      print "$_\n";
      my ($var, $value) = split(/\s*=\s+/, $_, 2);
      if ($value =~ s/^\$(\w+)//) {
        $value .= $env_var{$1} || '';
      }
      $env_var{$var} = $value;
      my ($caller_package) = caller;
      *{"${caller_package}::${var}"} = $value;
    } # end if
  } # end while
} # END import() definition
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