Centos – cp command prompts on overwrite even with -f

I don't think a command or shell builtin for this exists, as it's a trivial subset of what the Bourne shell for loop is designed for and implementing a command like this yourself is therefore quite simple.

Per JimB's suggestion, use the Bash builtin for generating sequences:

for i in {1..10}; do command; done

For very old versions of bash, you can use the seq command:

for i in `seq 10`; do command; done

This iterates ten times executing command each time - it can be a pipe or a series of commands separated by ; or &&. You can use the $i variable to know which iteration you're in.

If you consider this one-liner a script and so for some unspecified (but perhaps valid) reason undesireable you can implement it as a command, perhaps something like this on your .bashrc (untested):

#function run
run() {
    number=$1
    shift
    for i in `seq $number`; do
      $@
    done
}

Usage:

run 10 command

Example:

run 5 echo 'Hello World!'

Since you said you were experiencing this issue when running the script through cron, here are a couple ideas.

99% of the problems that arise when running scripts through cron are because of $PATH. The path used by cron is very minimal. You do specify the full path to the init script, so I wouldnt expect this to be the issue. Your script doesnt do anything else does it?

Also, in your script, if you are using bash, you can change the first line (the shebang) and add a second line as follows

#!/bin/bash -x
exec &>/tmp/script.log

This will enable debugging when cron runs the script. It will also log all output from the script to /tmp/script.log. Once you solve the issue you can revert this back.