in reply to Handling passwords and sensitive data

Read the data from STDIN and disable the screen echo for the password. This works effectively but has the side effect that it requires someone to type in the password making unusable for automated scripts run by cron or from other scripts.

Not so. In any reasonable shell: 

perl my_prog.pl < password.txt

[download]

works fine. But it breaks cross-platform scripts, so your config file example is much better.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom