in reply to A good way to input data into a script w/o an SQL database

As others have suggested, your requirements are somewhat vague. However, if you mean "I have configuration data baked into my code. Is there a better way?", then you may find YAML of use:

use YAML; ... my $options = YAML::LoadFile($fileName); ... YAML::DumpFile($fileName, $options);

An options file might look like:

--- alarm: AlarmHorn.wav courts: - avail: 1 name: Court 1 players: 4 size: 4 - avail: 1 name: Court 2 players: 4 size: 4 - avail: 1 name: Court 3 players: 4 size: 4 fontSize: 12 geom: 630x470 time: 720

There are of course many other similar modules, in particular flavour of the decade seems to be JSON.

Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond