Thank you for all the suggestions, I did wind up using Config::Simple, the only thing I'm not understanding is why it won't accept a relative path to the file. I am opening like this:

if ($cfgpath) {
    use Config::Simple ('-lc');
    my $cfg = new Config::Simple($cfgpath)
      or die "Could not find configuration file $cfgpath\n";
.....
[download]

The problem is that if $cfgpath contains anything other than a full path and filename it doesn't work. If I just specify the config filename alone it doesn't find it, even if it's in the same directory as the script (which I can sort of understand, it's probably looking at some other directory) BUT it also won't work if I specify something like ~/temp/myconfig.cfg, even though the file exists. If I specify the full path then it works. Not a huge deal, I guess, but I wish I understood why that won't work.