Agent is unable to use sudo due to no TTY

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I am not sure which version this issue appeared, but it has been present since at least 1.5. Cursor is no longer able to use sudo due to the session not having a TTY. Since 1 or 2 months I’ve had to cut and paste every single sudo command into a terminal and run it and cut and paste the result back into the agent. Very time consuming and no longer automatic as it was before when sudo worked!

Steps to Reproduce

Install cursor on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, try to do anything that required root access!

Expected Behavior

Previously it ran an interactive shell (and I could enter the password, which it would cache for a while).

Operating System

Linux

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.7.17
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 34881053400013f38e2354f1479c88c9067039a0
Date: 2025-09-29T03:10:26.099Z
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Linux x64 6.14.0-29-generic

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Auto

Additional Information

It means cursor is pretty much useless for any operations requiring root access. It would be just as easy to use ChatGPT or Claude web versions.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

1 Like
2

Thanks for the report, I’ve passed it on to the team.

3

I started experiencing this today with background agents. This morning I could spin up background agents, but this afternoon they all fail on sudo apt-get install commands with the error you mentioned.

4

Thanks for the info. We’re investigating this.