Mod rewrite to redirect into subdirectories by first letter

[c4n]

Hello,

I'm trying to get this mod rewrite working, but so far wasn't successful.

The thing is I have a folder called "viri" with a large number of files inside. To reorganize everything I am creating subdirectories a-z 0-9 and moving all files in the appropriate folder according to their first letter.

For example I am moving all files that start with "a" to /viri/a/ , all files that start with "b" to /viri/b/ etc. So

http://www.mydomain.com/viri/test.php

will become

http://www.mydomain.com/viri/t/test.php

Now what I'm trying to do is to redirect people visiting the old URLs to the new ones. This is the closest I think I got, but doesn't work:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^\/(\w)(.*)$ /$1/$1$2 [R=301,L]

Or

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^\/viri\/(\w)(.*)$ /viri/$1/$1$2 [R=301,L]

I have the R=301 as I want this to be a permanent redirect.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestions.