No you aren't missing anything - my bad. The eval cat option should be using backticks, not double quotes, e.g. eval `cat myfile.pl`

My apologies.

If that doesn't help then perhaps you could show a reduced version of your whole set up using just 1 or two variables. Even with the backticks, to get this to work you must take care with how you declare your variables. You will need to declare your variables in the calling script. If you declare them as "my", your config file should merely set variables and not declare them (no my). Alternatively you can declare your variables in both the calling and config script if you use our.