imp and Samy_rio have shown you the documentation that demonstrates that there is a meaning to the result you got. Perhaps you were expecting the assignment of a hash to a scalar to behave in a similar way to assigning an array to a scalar, i.e. give the number of keys and values in the hash. If that was what you wanted you can do that like this

use strict;
use warnings;

my %hash = (a => 1, b => 2, c => 3);
my $buckets = %hash;
my $elems = () = %hash;
print qq{ Buckets: $buckets\nElements: $elems\n};
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which prints

 Buckets: 3/8
Elements: 6
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I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG