You are returning a reference to the array, not the array itself. That is a fine thing to do, but then you want to dereference it at the receiving end. Something like this:

sub getfiles()
{
  opendir DIR,$logSite or die "Unable to open Directory, please try ag
+ain";
  foreach $pattern (@ARGV)
  {
    push (@uploads, grep /$pattern/, readdir(DIR));
  }
  closedir DIR;
   
  return \@uploads;
}

my $aref = &getfiles;
print @$aref;  # or whatever
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