in reply to reading commands from configuration file

As you should know from reading ikegami's reply on your other thread about this problem, if you want to run a set of commands "in sequential order one by one", you want these things in an array (or maybe an array of hashes, as ikegami suggested), not in a hash.

Assuming that the sequence of commands does not involve anything that requires manual interaction by prompting for user input from "stdin", the easiest thing is to have the list of commands as plain text, one command per line, and execute each one in turn, in any of several ways.

With unix/linux, this sort of text file is also known as a "shell script", which could just be executed on its own using the shell (e.g. source command_list.file or just  . command_list.file) -- no need for perl, really.

Is there something you need to do that a simple shell script doesn't do for you?