Perl has a concept called "context". Different functions or constructs return different things depending on whether they're called in a list (or array) context or a scalar context.

For example, you could have just said

my $ct=@files;
[download]

and $ct would have been set correctly, because that assignment is a scalar context, and in a scalar context an array or list returns its number of elements.

Since "print" is a list context, I had to use the "scalar" operator to get the count of elements rather than the list of values.

Check out "perldoc -f scalar" and "perldoc perldata" for more information.
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Mike