That's a useless use of ls * and dangerous use of backticks.

You're assuming your cron script starts in the right directory. This is probably not true.

You're assuming that all the files you find are .jpg files -- is this true? no jpeg? no gif? no png?

You don't need to use \ to extend lines when you can just put a pipe on the end, and continue the other end of the pipe on the next line.

You've done no error checking, which allows your program to delete files without copying them.

How about this:

Code:

cd /path/to/files/

ls *.jpg |
        while read x; do echo "`expr $RANDOM % 1000`:$x"; done |
        sort -n| sed 's/[0-9]*://' | 
        for X in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
        do
                read LINE || break
                if ! cp "$LINE" "/path/to/dest/${X}.jpg"
                then
                        echo "Couldn't copy $LINE" >&2
                        break
                fi

                rm "$LINE"
        done