What you are referring to is known as soft links, and they are really not worth it. Instead use a hash. Also, i don't see why you need to differentiate between creating a variable and setting a variable. Perl knows what do to, so let's get rid of $variablecmd - you really probably don't need it.

use strict; #dammit!

my %hash;
open(CONF," conf.file") || die 'didn't open for reading';

while(<CONF>) {
    my ($name,$data) = split; # look ma, no args!
    $hash{$name} = $data;
}

close CONF;
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Now you have all of your 'variables' and their values stored in one convient location a hash. Try this just after the close:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper %hash;
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Later in your code, when you need to access one of the config variables, say 'foo', you do so like this: $hash{foo}

Jeff

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