You could always create a module (maybe there is one, but I don't recall seeing it.. maybe I will write it tonight if I can find a reasonable use for it) which simply looks at a file with name/val pairs and imports them into the environment. I guess I just don't see any cases which this would be useful, but would love to hear of any :)

I can't say that I'm 100% sure of what this person is looking to do, but from the above statement, I'd say take a look at dotsh.pl.

Snippet:

require "dotsh.pl";
$ENV{SHELL} = "/bin/sh";
if(-f "/some/file/to/source") { dotsh("/some/file/to/source") }
[download]

This is similar to doing a
$ . /some/file/to/source
in Unix. Hope that's what you all were looking for. If so, I use this a bunch in order to pick up environments created by a source file that Tivoli uses, in order to set paths and the like.