In normal programs the only interesting thing about this is that it's guaranteed to return false for an empty hash and something that's true otherwise. So you can check if a hash is empty or not by simply using the hash name in boolean context (which is a scalar context): 
if (%hash) {
   ..do something for a filled %hash...
} else {
   ...do something for an empty %hash...
}

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In reply to Re^3: How should I understand scalar(%hash) results? by thospel
in thread How should I understand scalar(%hash) results? by TVSET

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