you already got very good answer, but, strange to me, some option was not mentioned.

Storable is a core module perfectly suited to load perl data structures from file. I have two command saved to read between Storable and YAML:

sto2yaml=perl -MYAML -MStorable -e "print Dump @{retrieve ($ARGV[0])};
+" $*
yaml2sto=perl -e "use YAML (LoadFile); use Storable qw(nstore); @ar = 
+LoadFile($ARGV[0]); nstore(\@ar, $ARGV[1])" $*
[download]

Also Data::Dumper is a core module able to store and retrieve perl datastructures.

Then there is also Sereal a CPAN module offering great performances.

If you are only interested in something like an external configuration you can find fun my Modules as configuration files

L*