First, Perl's conditional operator is a ternary operator, but it's called "conditional operator," not "ternary operator." The "conditional operator" is a specific operator; "ternary operator" describes a kind of operator.

Use the conditional operator only for conditional statements that return a single result—one scalar, list, hash, reference, etc.—and use it only for what it returns. In general, use it mostly for assigments to variables. Don't put program behavior—actions—inside the return-this parts of conditional operators. For that, use if-then-else statements instead. Your code will be more readable, more understandable, and more maintainable.

So…

my $test_result = <some test that returns a Boolean value>;
print $test_result ? qw( c ) : qw( a b );
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…or, better…

my $test_result = <some test that returns a Boolean value>;
my @values = $test_result ? qw( c ) : qw( a b );
print @values;
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