The "cp" command turned out to be a PITA as it was asking me for confirmation each and every time a file was to be overwritten.
Why is this happening? Because RedHat/Centos guys have added the following alias in bash conf files:
alias cp='cp -i'-i means interactive, or in more words: "prompt before overwrite (overrides a previous -n option)".
The solution to this safe but annoying alias (in this case) is to `unalias` it or just ignore it by prefixing the command with a \.
\cp -a /home/xyz/* /home/zyx/No more annoying confirmations, now I can go to bed. ZzzZz.