How to spawn gdb with superuser permission (sudo)?

[yakamoz423]

I installed cdt-gdb-vscode in VS Code on Windows, and opened a folder in Remote WSL mode. Then start debugging, gdb says ptrace: Operation not permitted. The same warning is shown when I use bash instead. But in bash, debugging session works via sudo gdb attach xxxcommand. So how to launch "sudo gdb" to start debugging? Thanks for replying!

launch.json configurations is:

        {
            "type": "gdb",
            "request": "attach",
            "name": "linux",
            "gdb": "gdb",
            "processId": "${command:askProcessId}",
            "program": "/usr/bin/vi",
            "verbose": "true",
        }

[paul-marechal]

I don't know if it would work but I'd make a sudo_gdb.sh script like:

#!/bin/bash
sudo gdb $@

And then point the configuration to spawn this script instead of gdb directly?

[yakamoz423]

Thank you, it works. I used expect script instead.

#!/usr/bin/expect

spawn sudo gdb $argv
expect "password for <username>: "
send "<password>\n"
interact

[jonahgraham]

The workaround of using the script is ok, but the other solution may be to enable ptrace, see for example this SO answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/32274645/2796832