If you are not familiar with subroutines, check out our article on Perl - Getting Started with Subroutines.

Let's say you have the following script. In this example, the @foo array in the greeting subroutine contains "Hello World", and then the @foo array is returned. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

sub greeting {
  my @foo = qw(Hello World);
  return @foo;
}

Outside of the subroutine, the output of the greeting subroutine is stored in the @bar array.

my @bar = greeting();
print "@bar \n";

Running this script will output the following.

Hello World

Be aware that when a subroutine is returning an array, you wouldn't want to store the results in a variable.

my $count = greeting();
print "$count \n";

As this would return the count, which would be 2 in this example, since there are 2 elements in the array (Hello and World).