I see nothing wrong with this idiom. It's how I would do it, but if you were worried about generating the extra data (Which in this case your not) I would recommend looking at Want. "wantarray on steriods". In this example you could use the howmany() sub to determine how many items the caller wants.

But for most cases I would stick to plain ol' wantarray()

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."