If you're using someone else's function, and only want the first element, you can do something like this:

$val=(split(/\./,$bar))[0];
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If you're writing your own function, you can use the wantarray function to tell if the function has been called in an array or scalar context:

sub flexible {
....
   if (wantarray) {
      return @arr;
   } else {
      return $scal;
   }
}
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