Finally, here is the poor man's approach in the spirit of TIMTOWTDI:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# perl 5.8 feature, open a scalar as a filehandle
open my $fh, '>', \my $pod or die "Couldn't open filehandle: $!";


while (<DATA>) {
    print $fh $_ if /^=/ .. /^=cut/
}

print $pod;



__DATA__

# Some code
my $foo = 'bar';

=head1 This is a B<heading>

This is a paragraph.

    This is a verbatim section.

This is I<B<another>> paragraph

=cut
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--
John.