Hi, there's a better way. You might like Config::Tiny for example.

Here is the almost 20-year old classic explanation of why it's a bad idea to do what you are trying to do: Why it's stupid to 'use a variable as a variable name'.

Hope this helps!

Hello mcaongusa, and welcome to the Monastery!

I can't figure out what I am doing wrong.

If a my declaration occurs in an eval, its scope extends only to the end of that eval. From the documentation for my:

A my declares the listed variables to be local (lexically) to the enclosing block, file, or eval.

But anyway, as 1nickt and hippo have said, what you’re trying to do is a bad idea, and there are better approaches.

Hope that helps,

Maybe take a read through Reading Variables from a File too? Be sure to pay attention to how everyone warns against using symbolic references.

In general, don't use eval or similar (evalbytes, do, require, use) for configuration data. See also: Re^2: conf file in Perl syntax, Re: Accessing variables in an external hash without eval

Alexander

Update:

The doc shortcut [doc://evalbytes] seems to be broken at perlmonks, linking to http://perldoc.perl.org/evalbytes.html instead of the correct http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/evalbytes.html.

Thanks to AnomalousMonk.

Second update:

Fixed!