The reason I want to destroy it in the program is that the menu that it's holding is repeatedly updated with new items, or with different items, and there are times when it must be completed cleared of all items. When it's been torn off, then after all the menu items are deleted, you just have this tiny little window with the Title Banner shrunk down to minimum size. It all pops back up when new items are added to the menu, but in the mean time, it looks ugly -- kind of like a shrivelled up old balloon.

Regardless of why you want to be able to find children of a given widget the children method of a widget can provide interesting information about how Tk's heirarchies work.

Included here is an example of how to tell exactly how a tear off menu is parented. You can see that when you have the menu torn off an additional child of the main window becomes available that is of type Tk::Menu.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Tk;

# Create the main window
my $w;
$w->{main} = MainWindow->new;
$w->{mb} = $w->{main}->Menubutton( -text => 'Menu' )->pack;
$w->{mb}->command( -label => 'print kids', -command => [ \&find_kids, 
+$w ] );
$w->{main}->Button( -text => 'print kids', -command => [ \&find_kids, 
+$w ] )->pack;

sub find_kids
{
    my $w = shift;
    # Find all the children of main.
    print "***** new report *****\n";
    foreach ($w->{main}->children)
    {
        print "1) $_\n";
        # find all the grandchildren
        foreach ($_->children)
        {
            print "2)\t$_\n";

            # find the great grand kids...
            foreach ($_->children)
            {
                print "3)\t\t$_\n";
            }
        }
    }
}

MainLoop;
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