You want to take things a step further; set up your packages as modules. Your modules can export specific variables and/or subroutines. This is done using theExporter module. Follow the Exporter link to read its documentation. You also need to "use" the module instead of "require" it. require doesn't trigger the export of variables and subs.

Also be sure to have a look at perlmod to gain a better understanding of modules. You'll find it pretty helpful.

The problem is that variable declarations under use strict are checked at compile-time, but require isn't executed until run-time. So the variables aren't yet declared when your code is compiled, and they trigger an error.

The solution (apart from breaking this out into a module, as davido suggested) is to load the config file before the rest of your code is compiled. You can do this by loading it in a BEGIN block:

BEGIN { require 'config.pl'; }
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Also, it may be that do 'config.pl' is what you really want; require will only load the config file once, even if you have several modules that are using it. do is closer to an eval, which is what I think of when I'm loading a config file.

You really want a module rather than a require as it addresses the issues you are trying to solve. Simple Module Tutorial. For example then you could have a function like:

use vars '$dbh';
END{ $dbh->disconnect() if $dbh }

sub connect {
    # connect database handle unless we have one already
    $dbh ||= DBI->connect....
}
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Then in your code you just call connect() whenever and wherever you need a DBH. The first call to it $dbh will be undef so it will get initialized. After that the connect() function just returns the existing DBH. Bonus features include automatically disconnecting and only connecting if you have to.

Thanks to everyone. I've created the module and everything looks good