strict is your friend - it'll save you a lot of debugging (mistyped variable names, etc.).

As for using or requiring a file to set variables, you could do that, but you probably don't want to.

What might make sense is to write a function in a second perl script that reads a file containing your parameters and returns them as, say, a hash-reference.

e.g. (not fully tested)

require 'test_03.pl';

my $result = SetVars();
foreach(keys %{$result}){
  print "$_ : ${$result}{$_}\n";
}
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and then in test_03.pl:

use strict;

sub SetVars(){
  my %vars;
  open(VARS, 'myvars.txt')||die "Cannot open myvars.txt:$!\n";
  while(<VARS>){
    chomp;
    $vars{(split /:/)[0]} = (split /:/)[1];
  }
  return \%vars;
}

return 1;
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