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.

1 Like
6

work around mentioned elsewhere - enabling legacy terminal in settings lets you type in the sudo password again.

7

Same here. Kubuntu 24.04 (Linux x64), latest Cursor version 1.7.46. It wanted to run a ‘sudo apt get’ but it got auto-rejected as it said it lacked permissions. Have yet to try the suggested workaround of enabling the legacy terminal. Not a great first experience coming from Copilot where this “just works”.

Also had a chat stall on me without any progress. Never had that on Copilot.

8

I canceled my subscription over this. Made Cursor basically unusable for too many use cases

2 Likes
9

gonna have to cancel subcription im unable to ejecute anything witg sudo via agent and it wont let me type my password like before

10

not working as of today

11

I am still using Cursor Version 1.5 due to this issue not having been fixed yet. It would be nice to be able to use the newer versions!

12

Wow, I’m not the only one. I just canceled my subscription. This is really a ■■■■■■■ mess. Sometimes it works after I talked the AI into finally using the terminal correctly. After a restart of cursor it forgets and I’m again working 30 min to get it into using the terminal. Right now I have a “Agent terminals are read only” message inside the terminal.
Bye Cursor Subscription. Is was nice, but I’ll try something else now. Obviously this is a known issue for months now and the Devs aren’t interested i fixing it.
Btw I activated legacy terminal in settings, since then it only “sometimes” uses the terminal correctly.