Personally, I've found the following setup to be the easiest :

I have a routine, readconfig(), which takes a string as the parameter (the name of the configuration file). A template configuration file, filled with sane defaults, is stored in the __DATA__ section of my program. Readfile reads the data either from the file specified, or, if the name is empty, from the __DATA__ section. I call readconfig() twice, once to initialize with the sane defaults, and then again with the name of the config file (if given), to overwrite the settings differing from the defaults.

Of course, this answer dosen't help you with how to organize your configuration data, but the configuration data depends much on what your program does (and what data it needs) and what your audience is. Apache for example uses some kind of HTML/XML style to store the configuration. I prefer either .ini style sections with name=value pairs or simple name=value pairs.

In reply to Re: What is the easiest way of having a configuration file for my program? by Corion
in thread What is the easiest way of having a configuration file for my program? by Anonymous Monk

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