G'day pme,

Thankyou for your excellent question. Those of us who've been coding Perl for a quarter of a century or more, may often rely upon muscle memory rather than using any actual brain cells. When I start a new script, I often find that I've witten

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

before I've even thought about the problem.

Any Perl function that has function LIST can be expanded using function function-returning-list LIST. This is pretty much what 🦛 says.

Many commands allow the use of $_, check the documentation.

Hopefully, combined with other responses, that answers your question. Of course, if anything is still unclear, ask for further clarification.