I'm looking to read a configuration file with a bare installation of perl 5.8.

Whilst installing modules isn't 100% out of the question I would much rather not do so. The operating system is specifically GNU/Linux, and no other platform is going to be required ever. (I know this because the operations that the perl script manages make no sense under none-Linux platforms.)

I have code to parse a configuration file with the basic 'key = value' format, but now I need to have multiple values for each key so I am looking at alternatives. I see several configuration file parsers available via CPAN but I'm trying to keep to core perl. (Some my ask why and tell me to just install the module - that is a valid response, and I can see the motivation behind it.)

My current code looks something like this:

=head2 readConfig

  Read the configuration file specified, return a hash of the
 options read.

=cut

sub readConfig
{
    my ($file) = ( @_ );

    my %CONFIG;

    open( FILE, "<", $file ) or die "Cannot read config file '$file' -
+ $!";


    while (defined(my $line = <FILE>) ) 
    {
        chomp $line;
      
    # Skip comments
    next if ( $line =~ /^([ \t]*)\#/ );

    # Skip blank lines
    next if ( length( $line ) < 1 );

    # Strip trailing comments.
    if ( $line =~ /(.*)\#(.*)/ )
    {
        $line = $1;
    }

    # Find variable settings
    if ( $line =~ /([^=]+)=([^\n]+)/ )
    {
        my $key = $1;
        my $val = $2;

        # Strip leading and trailing whitespace.
        $key =~ s/^\s+//;
        $key =~ s/\s+$//;
        $val =~ s/^\s+//;
        $val =~ s/\s+$//;
        
        # Store value.
        $CONFIG{ $key } = $val;
    }
    }

    close( FILE );
    return( %CONFIG );
}
[download]

Is there anything in the perl core which will save me the job? So far I tried running 'locate -i config | grep pm' with no joy..

The obvious solution I can think about is storing an array reference in the hash..