Error using copyfile function in Matlab2020b

Hello,

I am trying to experiment the usage of copyfile for copying a .jar file for source location to destination. I have written a test script that takes the jar file from the current location and move it to a destination folder "C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2020b\sys\java\jre\win64\jre\lib\ext".

However I keep getting error message that "The system cannot find the file specified".

I can confirm that the file is located on the same path where my script TestFileTransfer.m is located. When I change my destination location to somewhere NOT under "C:\Program Files", the script works perfectly fine. Does anybody have any idea what might be the issue ? anything related to ADMIN rights ?

Here is the script snippet TestFileTransfer.m

when the dest_fldr = "C:\temp", it works fine.

testfile = 'testfile.jar';

dest_fldr = "C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2020b\sys\java\jre\win64\jre\lib\ext";
%dest_fldr = "C:\temp"; 

if (exist(testfile,'file'))
    try
        copyfile(testfile, dest_fldr, 'f');
    catch e
        disp(e.message); %The system cannot find the file specified
    end
else
    error('File does not exist');
end

[Ive J]

I would guess you need special permissions for that. Have you tried with admin account?

[Pratik Chachad]

@Ive J yes, That is the only possibility that I can think off too. When I try to manually copy/paste the file, it pops-up this dialoque box

But I can Hit "Continue" and it puts them over there. Not sure if there a way to some how do this in Matlab though.

[Walter Roberson]

No, there is no way to do it through MATLAB. You are trying to bypass Microsoft UAC (User Account Control), which was built in to Windows starting about Windows 7. In order to make it harder for malware to infect a system, you need system privileges to write into C:\Program Files

[Pratik Chachad]

Thanks Walter for your inputs.

[Max Heimann]

What if you launch matlab with admin privileges? Not that this would neccesarily be a good idea, but would it give matlab the needed priviliges?

[Ive J]

@Max Heimann yes that would work.

file = "something";
dest = "C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2021b\sys\java\jre\win64\jre\lib\ext";
copyfile(file, dest) % works even without 'f' flag