G'day slugger415,

If you look in the documentation for Net::SFTP, you'll see under $sftp->ls($remote [, $subref ])]:

"... returns a list of directory entries, each of which is a reference to a hash ..." [my emphasis]

So you're getting something like this:

$ perl -E 'my $x = {a=>1}; say $x'
HASH(0xad5cb8)
[download]

You can use modules like Data::Dumper (builtin) or Data::Dump (CPAN) to investigate further, e.g.

$ perl -E 'use Data::Dump; my $x = {a=>1}; dd $x'
{ a => 1 }
[download]