Yeah, the module in the middle method is the only clean way I can see. The if statement works but I also have to "use if" all the modules.

Basically we have a module that we include everywhere to set up our environment, but we recently ran into a problem where we called someone else's Perl script from the module if a value wasn't set, which loaded our module, which called itself, which loaded our module.... etc etc etc *disaster*.

So now we are trying to make it so that only our code calls it, even though it is set in PERL5OPT