Shell Programming and Scripting

# your source/target directory may change
# so save it better in a variable
SRC_DIR="/incoming/"
TRG_DIR="/replicate/"

# looking for all files in source directory
# dereferencing soft links, not going deeper in
# subdirs - just as you wanted :-)
for filename in $(find -L $SRC_DIR -maxdepth 1 -type f)
do
    # looking if corresponding file does not exist in target directory
    if ! test -e "${TRG_DIR}$(basename $filename)"
    then
        # copy if it doesn't
        cp ${filename}  ${TRG_DIR}
    fi
    # don't sleep on your workplace :-)
    #sleep 30
done