in reply to Perl techniques for defeating this enemy?

Reading the config file seems very straight forward.

my %name_for; while (<>) { my ($name, @aliases) = split; $name_for{$_}=$name for ($name,@aliases); }

After that, you can take a string of names/aliases and replace them with their real names like so:

my $foo = 'alias1:blah1'; $foo =~ s/(\w+)/$name_for{$1}/g;

That's assuming quite a few things about the format of $foo, however.