Acquiring Permission to Support Debugging on a Mac

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Debugging on OS X is a privileged operation; only a process with adequate access rights can act as a debugger. In RAD Studio, this requirement is met by code-signing dbkosx_16_0, the executable file that requires privileged access rights. In order to guarantee support for debugging on the Mac, you need to log in on the Developer Tools Access dialog box using the administrator or root user password:

  • The first time you start the Platform Assistant in a session (or when you start a debugging session on the Mac), the Mac displays a login dialog for Developer Tools Access. You need to provide the password for the root user on that Mac. The password is required only once per session.
  • If you are accessing the Mac remotely, you might need to take an extra step in order to guarantee debugging access to your Mac applications:
    • You might receive the following message on the Mac when you try to debug your application:
    Error: file permissions do not allow debugging
    • If you get this error message (or if the Developer Tools Access dialog appears repeatedly), you might cautiously decide to assign privilege to the debugger by setting the user ID of dbkosx_16_0 to root, as follows:
sudo chown root dbkosx_16_0
sudo chmod u+s,g+x dbkosx_16_0

Caution: Be aware that using these sudo commands might present a significant security risk. We recommend that you take precautions: Keep a copy of the original dbxosx_16_0 file. After debugging your application, delete the dbxosx_16_0 file for which you set the uid root, and restore the original file.

See Also