Caveat: I'm guessing you're not using strict? When testing some code like this, eval would die because $VAR1 was not declared.

I would make your eval code a little more robust, to check for errors in the eval'd structure.

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %somehash;
open DATA, "$ARGV[0]" or die "$!";
  {
      local $/;
      my $code = <DATA>;

      my $VAR1 = eval $code;
      if($@) {
        die "eval: $@\n";
      }
      %somehash  = %$VAR1;
  }
print Dumper(\%somehash);
[download]

This is a nasty hack and not a good solution to persistance however ;)