I don't know the rest of your code, but my strong recommendation would be to put the config variables in a hash. Instead of "${$var} = $val", you'd say "$config_value_for{$var} = $val" and then access those values through the hash. Better still, use something like Config::Std—if your situation allows for that. If you really have to have Perl variables of the same name as what's in the config, what you're doing is what you have to do, but I think you'd probably be doing yourself a favor by retooling the rest of your code to remove that requirement.