Windows – Powershell Access to the path denied

This is just my thoughts and opinion on how I might do this...and I did change around the variables names a bit so they match up to the cmdlets used. You don't have to just made it more readable to me.

# I don't have a domain computer to work with so my local 
#  PC includes the "public" folder you likely want have 
#  this but nice to include just in case. As well the "Default*" 
#  is there because I'm on Windows 8.1 
#  so the upgrade modified the "Default" folder 
#  to be "Default.migrated" for some reason.

# The "-Exclude" allows you to put in the names of those items (directory names
#   or file names) that you want to exclude, it allows wildcard values as well)
#   Then as suggested in a comment using -ExpandProperty FullName allows the 
#   object to be passed as a string instead of a system object which
#   adds on extra characters that some other cmdlet may not like.
$userFolder = Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Users' -Exclude 'Default*','All Users','Administrator', 'Public' | 
   Select -ExpandProperty FullName

# just the file I was playing with here
$sFile = '.\text.txt'


foreach ($uf in $userFolder) {

    $dest = "$uf\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\"

# I want to test for the path to exist first and if it 
#  does then add the file, if it does not then you 
#  would create the directory and copy the file. 
#  I noticed in yours that you created an empty 
#  file and then copied it. Works the same way.

    if (Test-Path $dest) {
        Copy-Item -Path $sFile -Destination $dest -Force
    }
    else {
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $dest -Force
        Copy-Item -Path $sFile -Destination $dest -Force
    }
}

As already noted I am on a standalone computer playing with this but the output of the commands I get are here:

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path C:\Users\Shawn\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\ -Force
Copy-Item -Path .\text.txt -Destination C:\Users\Shawn\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\ -Force

You can also have it output the command it would execute if you want to test it first by just wrapping the commands in double-quotes: "Copy-Item -Path $sFile -Destination $dest -Force"

Suggest a couple minor syntax corrections (these changes won't solve your problem, it's just better syntax):

$mysys = 'c:\windows\*'    
Get-ChildItem -path . -Include *.txt -Exclude $mysys -Recurse

Anyhow...

why is it even going under c:\windows when I excluded it

You're only excluding things in "C:\windows" from the results of Get-ChildItem. GCI still needs to check in the folders you told it to check, to see if anything matches, which causes the Access Denied error.

If you want to completely avoid folders you don't have access to, then you'll need to build a list of folders you wish to check with GCI, instead of just telling GCI to check everything in the current path.

The only way to do this is basically the same procedure: check every folder, and keep a list of the ones that you don't get Access Denied on, then use that list with GCI. In the end you're still attempting to access the folders (and throwing the error) anyway, so there's basically no gain to doing that (expect additional complexity).

If you just don't like seeing the red errors while running the command, you can use the -ErrorAction parameter and tell GCI to continue silently on error. For example:

Get-ChildItem -path . -Include *.txt -Exclude $mysys -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue