I don't believe Mr Muskrat's suggestion would work. You are still in a scalar context.

If you really wanted to get the count of items in the array returned, you could do it thus:

sub x{return qw/e f g h 31/}; 
$a= @{[x()]}; # Force array context when calling sub
print $a

This prints the value 5
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The trick with the "@{[]}" is described in perfunc, under the function "scalar".