true, that does fit in five lines. i have a general aversion to the copy-paste right-click however so rather than having to paste a function in over a dozen files, i'd rather call a module that has all the functionality instead.

Have you checked out App::Config? It does exactly what your code does and more. The reason i didn't use it was a couple dozen configuration settings and i didn't want to set them all in every file before reading in the configuration. It's another aversion to redundancy...

happy coding,
jynx