It's insanely easy actually...if the function is simple; The following should be self-explanatory...I hope.

use warnings; #mmmm
use threads;

sub myfunc {
  print "Checking out port\n";
  wait 2;
  return 42;
}


print "Starting thread\n";
$thread = threads->new(\&myfunc());
print "doing some stuff\n";
wait 4;
$result = $thread->join();
print "The result is $result\n";
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