You should be able to combine the first two lines into a single line like so:

my @names = @{$r_cmds->{names}};
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And, while I don't see exactly where the array '@colnames' is coming from, your third line can be rewritten as well:

my $names_qty = @colnames;
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In scalar context, @arr will evaluate to the number of elements it contains. Therefore the following expression is always^[*] true ($#arr+1 == @arr)

Is that what you are looking for?

* for sane values of $[.... but it would be a bad idea to go mucking around with that anyway.

-Blake