Cygwin Pod::Usage malfunction?

Ambidangerous has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings, Perl Monks . . . .

Under three different Perls (ActiveState 5.8.3, Cygwin 5.8.2 precompiled, Cygwin 5.8.4 my compile), the following program does two different things, and after playing with it all day, I still can't figure it out.

PURPOSE

This program was automatically generated by a 'cookie cutter' program I wrote called anew.pl. It provides the basic skeleton for any quickie command line utility, using Getopt::Std and Pod::Usage to deliver a default --help and --version command for the new file.

The POD documentation embedded at the end normally is much larger; I've edited it here for space.

MISBEHAVIOR

It runs exactly as expected under AS Perl.

Under either the Cyg prebuilt (or my recent build of 5.8.4 for Cyg), everything works, except --help or -h. Instead of the Pod::Usage you'd expect, you get a blank line.

MY TESTS

I have isolated the problem to something in the HELP_MESSAGE() function. Inserting a print "Here I am!!!" in the sub always works. Something seems to be wonky with Pod::Usage.

I thought this might be some sort of problem with $0 (a tip given in the Pod::Usage docs), but no, when I have it print $0, it's ok, even in the varying invocations

$ perl -w test.pl

$ test.pl
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Also, when I deliberately hose the Pod::Usage module by specifying a bad input file { -input = "/you/are/hosed.pl" }, it properly complains about it.

Just out of paranoia, I tried it with both DOS and UNIX endlines. No difference.

FINALLY

A search of PM returned an article on coupling these two modules in the way I used, but made no mention of bugs or inconsistent behavior.

Any help would be appreciated.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w test.pl

use warnings;
use strict;

use Getopt::Std;
$Getopt::Std::STANDARD_HELP_VERSION = 1;

use Pod::Usage;

my $VERSION = v1.0.0;
my %options;

getopts('h', \%options);
HELP_MESSAGE() if $options{'h'};

print "ok"; # main program would go here.

sub HELP_MESSAGE {
    # the program reaches this point, I checked.
    pod2usage ( {
        -exit_status    => 0,
        -verbose_level     => 1
    } );
    # pod2usage seems to be doing nothing w/Cyg.
    # Why?
}

sub VERSION_MESSAGE {
    return 1 if (lc $ARGV[0] eq "--help");
    print "This program is $0, ";
    printf "version %vd\n", $VERSION;
    printf "(Using Perl v%vd)", $^V;
    exit 0;
}

__END__

=head1 NAME

test.pl

=head1 SYNOPSIS

A one line description, possibly command syntax.

[more headers deleted here for conciseness]

=head1 OPTIONS

=over 4

=item -h, --help

Prints synopsis and options, then exits.

=item --version

Prints version information and exits.

=back

=head1 ETC

[more headers deleted here for conciseness]
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