blokhead,
When I was working on this, I noticed revdiablo was generating all combinations of all sizes. I came up with a working solution to find only combinations of the desired size though it wasn't very elegant. I then sat down to figure out how I could make it generic for any size combinations (without having found this node) and came up with the following:

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

my $iter = combo( 5 , 1 .. 50  );
while ( my @combo = $iter->() ) {
    print "@combo\n";
}

sub combo {
    my $by = shift;
    return sub { () } if ! $by || $by =~ /\D/ || @_ < $by;
    my @list = @_;

    my @position = (0 .. $by - 2, $by - 2);
    my @stop     = @list - $by .. $#list;
    my $end_pos  = $#position;
    my $done     = undef;

    return sub {
        return () if $done;
        my $cur = $end_pos;
        {
            if ( ++$position[ $cur ] > $stop[ $cur ] ) {
                $position[ --$cur ]++;
                redo if $position[ $cur ] > $stop[ $cur ];
                my $new_pos = $position[ $cur ];
                @position[ $cur .. $end_pos ] = $new_pos .. $new_pos +
+ $by;
            }
        }
        $done = 1 if $position[0] == $stop[0];
        return @list[ @position ];
    }
}
[download]

I didn't spend a lot of time benchmarking it. In some cases it does better than yours and then in others it does much worse. In any case, since I went through the trouble I figured I would add it here (now that I found it) in the spirit of TIMTOWTDI.

Update: I kept the algorithm the same, but I made numerous optimizations. It is now much faster in the best case and only marginally slower than your method in the worst cases. The original is in HTML comments if anyone is interested.