Other folks have helped you figure out your perl/syntax issues, but I think there's a more fundamental issue + solution.

If you're going to have your config file be executable perl code that sets some variables, at least one of the following conditions should hold:

1. the variable names are known a priori to the calling code.
2. the variables live in a namespace — and there is no ambiguity as to what that namespace is.

In the first case, you can declare the variables with my in the calling code; that solves the problems you were having.

In the second case, you can write your config variables like so:

$config::fee="FEE"
$config::fi="FI"
$config::fo="FO"
@config::fum=qw / fee fi fo fum /
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Of course, that means that the variables are global, rather than lexicalized to the scope of the caller.

To get a little more fancy with that approach, you could insert a dynamically decided namespace into the assignments before eval'ing:

my $namespace = "here";
while (<DAT>) {
    s/([\$\@\%])/$1$namespace\::/;
    eval $_;
}
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But if you really want to go the lexical route, my personal inclination would be to store all the config variables in a single anymous hash:

# config:
{
  fee=>"FEE",
  fi=>"FI",
  fo=>"FO",
  fum=>[qw/ fee fi fo fum /],
}
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my $config_hr = do 'datafile.txt';
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If you're trying to keep it simple for the sake of some non-programmers who'll have to be maintaining these config files, I respectfully suggest that you abandon the eval'able code approach altogether, and use one of the solutions already created to address this concern. Please take a look at a short list of config file modules.