That template looks like it was written for a shell.

Anyways I would use a hash for the keys and regular expression substitution. So the first file would be read like: 

my @entry = split(/=/, $line, 2);
$val{$entry[0]} = $entry[1];

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and then substitute them in with: 
s/\$(\w+)/exists($val{$1})?$val{$1}:die "Undefined '$1' in entry '$new
+string' (line $.)"/eg;

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Now strict should be happy, and things are easy to scope. Plus I stuck a minimal error check in.

Oh, and strangle the person who wrote the stupid template willya?

In reply to RE (tilly) 3: keeping $$this defined locally by tilly
in thread keeping $$this defined locally by Specimen

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