That will tell you the length of the value deleted, not how many items were deleted. 

my %h = ( foo => 'foo123', bar => 'bar456', nak => '' );
print length delete $h{foo}, "\n";
print length delete $h{nak}, "\n";
print scalar @{[delete $h{bar}]}, "\n";
__END__
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In reply to Re^2: Delete a zero-valued hash element by kyle
in thread Delete a zero-valued hash element by sush

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