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, %hash in the foo subroutine contains a key value pair of employee => John Doe, and then %hash is returned.

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

sub foo {
  my %hash = ( employee => 'John Doe' );
  return %hash;
}

Outside of the subroutine, the output of the greeting subroutine is stored in the %foo hash.

my %foo = greeting();

Dumper can be used to display the structure of the hash.

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \%foo;

The %foo hash contains the employee key with a value of John Doe.

$VAR1 = {
           'employee' => 'John Doe'
        };