matching period with perl regular expression

Hello,

I have several strings where I am trying to eliminate the period and
everything after the period, using a regular expression. However, I am
having trouble getting this to work.

x = "wa.w"
gsub(x, "\..*", "", perl=TRUE)

[1] ""
Warning messages:
1: '\.' is an unrecognized escape in a character string
2: unrecognized escape removed from "\..*"

In perl, you can match a single period with \.
Is this not so even with perl=TRUE. I would like for x to be equal to

x = "wa"

What am I missing here?
-stephen
==========================================
Stephen J. Barr
University of Washington
WEB: www.econsteve.com