I was too lazy to upgrade from the fedora 7 standard (Tk804.027) but the class binding works! However, $menu->entrycget('active',-label) still won't work all by itself, and $menu->index('active') doesn't either. PLUS of course entrycget can only be applied to a Menu and not a cascade (who would have thot they should be different?)

So this rather different version does work, it seems simpler to me than getting into these "clone" things:

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

my $MW = MainWindow->new;
my $menu = $MW -> Menu(-type=>'menubar',-tearoff=>0);
$MW -> configure(-menu=>$menu);
$MW -> bind('Tk::Menu',"<Key-F1>"=>[\&printentry]); # the class bindin
+g
my %MM = (); my %MC = (); my %ME = (); 

$MM{one} = $MW -> Menu(-tearoff=>0);
$MC{one} = $menu -> cascade(-menu=>$MM{one},-label=>'one',-underline=>
+0,-tearoff=>0);
$ME{Ia} = $MM{one} -> command(-label=>'Ia',-command=>sub{exit});
$ME{Ib} = $MM{one} -> command(-label=>'Ib',-command=>sub{exit});
$ME{Ic} = $MM{one} -> command(-label=>'Ic',-command=>sub{exit});

$MM{two} = $MW -> Menu(-tearoff=>0);
$MC{two} = $menu -> cascade(-menu=>$MM{two},-label=>'two',-underline=>
+0,-tearoff=>0);
$ME{IIa} = $MM{two} -> command(-label=>'IIa',-command=>sub{exit});
$ME{IIb} = $MM{two} -> command(-label=>'IIb',-command=>sub{exit});
$ME{IIc} = $MM{two} -> command(-label=>'IIc',-command=>sub{exit});

my $label; my %name=(); 
$menu -> bind('<<MenuSelect>>' => sub {         # works only on "Menu"
        $label = undef;                         # NOT "cascade"
        my $this = $Tk::event->W;
        Tk::catch {$label = $this->entrycget('active',-label)};
});

my $x; 
foreach $x (keys %MM) {
        $MM{$x} -> bind('<<MenuSelect>>' => sub {    
                $name{$x} = undef;           
                my $that = $Tk::event->W;
                Tk::catch {$name{$x} = $that->entrycget('active',-labe
+l)};
        }); 
}

MainLoop;

sub printentry {
        print "hello $label\t$name{$label}\n"
}
[download]

The core of the solution is <<MenuSelect>>, which gets a promising single reference in Tk::Menu,

Whenever a menu's active entry is changed, a <<MenuSelect>> virtual event is sent to the menu. The active item can then be queried from the menu, and an action can be taken, such as setting context-sensitive help text for the entry.

Oh really! Not with the aforementioned $menu->index('active') it can't -- that just returns "none". But the people who wrote the O'Reilly Perl/Tk book managed; lucky for me a page on this comes up as a web sample because i don't have the book. That's where i got the four lines of the sub with <<MenuSelect>> in it.

My question now for anyone who has stuck with me thus far and understands better what is going on is:

What does $Tk::event->W do?