The canonical way of getting the number of elements of the list a function returns in list context is not by using 'map' (although that will work), but by assigning the result to an empty list, and assigning that to a scalar:

    my $count = () = expression_in_list_context;
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And if you remove some spaces, you're left with one of Perls secret operators:

    my $count =()= expression;   # Goatse operator.
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