Shell Programming and Scripting

Ok, so I just got charged with the task of deleting some 300 user folders in a FTP server to free up some space. I managed to grep and cut the list of user folders to delete into a list of one user folder per line.
Example:
bob00
jane01
sue03

In the home folder, there are folders a-z, and the user folders are stored in there based on the first letter of their user name...
Example:
b/bob00
j/jane01
s/sue03

So what I want to do is make a script that cd's into the first letter of the username and then deletes the folder based on my user list. Here's what I have thus far:

for firstlet in $('cat userlist.txt | cut -c 1'); do
cd $firstlet

My problem lies in the fact I need to find a way to put another conditional to delete the user folder associated with the letter it initially cd'ed with. Does anyone have any suggestions or another way of thinking this through? Any help is appreciated...thanks.

Is this script going to be run locally on the FTP server or remotely using the FTP protocol? This will make a big difference in how this can be done and what commands are available.

- B

This will run locally. Thanks

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

while IFS= read user
do
  echo "first->[${user%%${user##?}}]"
  rm -rf ${user%%${user##?}}/${user}
done < userlist.txt

Great! That worked seemed to have done it. Had to do some research on what each string operator did, but that was exactly what I needed. I really appreciate your help!

Code:

cat your_folder_list_file | while read line;do
    dir=`echo $line | sed 's/\(.\).*/\1/'`
    folder=${dir}/${line}
    if rm -rf  $folder  && echo "$folder is delete" ;then
    :
    else
      echo "Fail to delete folder $folder"
    fi
done