in reply to getting hashes out of config files

Hmm, your code snippet doesn't actually read from the file. Plus, if you're using Data::Dumper, you're going to have problems figuring out where the stuff begins and ends. If you only have one hash in a file, you could try to following (untested)
{ local $/; open FILE, "<$filename" or die "Can't open $filename for reading: +$!"; %myhash = eval ( <FILE> ); close FILE; }
The above snippet is just a guess, of course.

You should look into FreezeThaw for storing data of this type in a file. Each data structure can be reduced to a single string (freeze) and then restored (thawed) quite easily.

Cheers,
Ovid

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