Add ability to run gdb as sudo

[gibsjose]

Consider adding the ability to run gdb as sudo. There are instances in which you must run gdb as root but do not want to open a browser as root.

[cs01]

I started adding this feature in the form of a --sudo flag to gdbgui, and a sudo=False argument to GdbController, but am running into some problems.

When the gdb subprocess is launched under python, stdin, stdout, and stderr are captured as pipes. When I prefix the command with sudo, it prompts me for my password. However since stdin is a pipe, I can only pass it through from Python. I can pass a string in as stdin when I launch the subprocess (in this case a password), but there is no way to reliably tell that the password will need to be entered, so I can't pass it unconditionally from the user.

It seems like this will only work if "passwordless sudo" is allowed, which is probably rather rare. It would also work if the parent process were run as sudo, but that is already what you were doing and it ran gdbgui and the browser as root.

Another option would be to call os.setuid(0) if the --sudo option were passed. That gets around entering the password, but then still ends up back with the problem of either having passwordless sudo or running the parent process as sudo.

So at the moment I'm kind of stuck with this. What I really need is a way to let the system prompt the user for the root password, then save that authentication and run the gdb subprocesse with pipes attached to stdin/stdout/stderr. Any ideas on how I might do that?

[mahiuchun]

Have you considered using pkexec? It shows a GUI prompt for sudoer/root password.

[meleffendi]

I have a program that I need to run as sudo but I can't. I tried:

sudo /home/ubuntu/.local/bin/gdbgui

But here's the output:

Opening gdbgui with default browser at http://127.0.0.1:5000 exit gdbgui by pressing CTRL+C Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported. ($HOME is /home/ubuntu which is owned by ubuntu.) Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported. ($HOME is /home/ubuntu which is owned by ubuntu.) Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported. ($HOME is /home/ubuntu which is owned by ubuntu.) /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: iceweasel: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: seamonkey: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: mozilla: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: epiphany: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: konqueror: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: chromium: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: chromium-browser: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: google-chrome: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: www-browser: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: links2: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: elinks: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: links: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: lynx: not found /usr/bin/xdg-open: 851: /usr/bin/xdg-open: w3m: not found xdg-open: no method available for opening 'http://127.0.0.1:5000'

I tried opening the browser myself by clicking on it, then run the above command and I still get the same output. Any help? @cs01

[cs01]

gdbgui v0.14 is released in beta right now, which might help since it offers more flexibility in how the gdb command is specified. With v0.14 you can specify the command with gdbgui --gdb-cmd 'sudo gdb'. You can try it with

pipx run --no-cache --pip-args='--pre' gdbgui --gdb-cmd 'sudo gdb'

You an also now open the dashboard and specify the gdb command from there, rather than on the command line. See #346 for more details.

Something else you might try is not having gdbgui open the browser automatically: sudo gdbgui -n, then opening the browser.

[cs01]

This has landed in v0.14 of gdbgui. To use it, you can run

gdbgui --gdb-cmd 'sudo gdb'