Super Search didn't dig up what I was looking for.

I was reading Tom Christiansen's Perl Style talk and came across his suggestion to use

do "/path/to/config/file.conf";
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in the main script to read configuration information from another file of the form

# Config file for a perl script.

$user = 'BazB'
$pass = 'yaright';
$server = 'foo.bar.com';
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Unfortunately, this does not seem to work under strict.

My test script is

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my ($server, $user, $pass);

do "/home/baz/testconfig.conf";

print $server, "\n", $user, "\n", $pass, "\n";
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However it fails with

Use of uninitialized value in print at ./readconfig.pl line 8.
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I've tried playing around with the script, but the only way I can get it to 'work' is to comment out

use strict;
my ($server, $user, $pass);
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which is bad, bad, bad. Even then, there are warnings:

Name "main::user" used only once: possible typo at ./readconfig.pl lin
+e 8.
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(and similar for the other variables).

I certainly do not want to write a parser to read config files.

Why does using do in this manner fail?
Is there another simple way of reading configuration information without resorting to something like App::Config?

Cheers.

BazB

Edit: chipmunk 2002-02-10