If the point of this is to help you during the development of the program, but won't be used when the program has been deployed, I'd suggest trying the perl debugger. It lets you set break points, single-step, and lots of other things, besides breaking and twiddling values.

On the other hand, if this is a long-lived program, which should be re-configurable on the fly at any arbitrary time, then you could do the traditional UNIXy thing, and have the program trap, and reload its configuration, on the HUP signal.

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.