open(FILE, "test.txt") || die;
{
    local $/ = undef;    #set to 'slurp' mode
    $file = <FILE>;      #read entire file into $file
}
close FILE;

$start = '"';
$end   = '"';

my $inside = 0;
my $oldpos = 0;

while ($file =~ /(?<!\\)(\Q$start\E|\Q$end\E)/g) {
    if ($inside == 0) {
       $oldpos = pos($file) - length($start);
       $inside++;
    } else {
       print substr($file, $oldpos, pos($file)-$oldpos);
       $inside--;
    }
}
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I was thinking if there is a single regex solution?

#!/usr/bin/perl -wl
use strict;

my $string = 'foo "A small \"dog\" eats pie." bar "foobar"';

print $1 while $string =~ /(?<!\\)"(.*?)(?<!\\)"/gs;
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Addendum:

Hmm. It didn't take me fifteen minutes to write this post. perlmonkey must be typing at relativistic speeds. btw--double quotes are not special in a regex; you don't need to backslash them.

Here is a single regex inside the while loop, but it is slower:

while ( $file =~ /((?<!\\)\".*?(?<!\\)\")/sg) {
   print $1;
}
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Update: takshaka is correct of course. I flaked out and did not need to backslach the ", fortunatley it works just fine either way, just more clutter.

I dont know about my relativistic typing. I guess I am just that good :) Acutally I once took a typing test and got around a -400 wpm (note the negative!) ... apparently I got docked for extensively using the backspace key. (Either that or I typed so damn fast that I overflowed the signed int ... yah, thats it, I really typed 65136 wpm, man I'm good!)

Russ