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Troubleshooting

If you ever run into problems installing or using Frida, here’s a few tips that might be of help. If the problem you’re experiencing isn’t covered below, please report an issue so the Frida community can make everyone’s experience better.

ValueError: ambiguous name; it matches:

This means the process name you specified in frida.attach() matches more than one process. You can use the PID instead:

session = frida.attach(12345)

SystemError: attach_to_process PTRACE_ATTACH failed: 1

This (probably) means that you don’t have permissions to attach to the target process. The process may be owned by another user and you are not root. You may have forgotten to enable ptrace of non-child processes. Try:

sudo sysctl kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=0

This could also be due to Magisk Hide. Try disabling it and rebooting before running your command.

Failed to spawn: unexpected error while spawning child process ‘XXX’ (task_for_pid returned ‘(os/kern) failure’)

On macOS this probably means that you didn’t properly sign Frida or that there is a permission missing. For example if you are running Frida over SSH and can’t respond to the authentication dialog that would pop up under normal use.

If it’s a signature problem, follow this procedure else, try:

**WARNING: This may weaken security**
sudo security authorizationdb write system.privilege.taskport allow

You also may have to disable System Integrity Protection to instrument system binaries but, again, */!\ this WILL weaken security /!*.

ImportError: dynamic module does not define init function (init_frida)

This or another similar error message is seen when trying to use frida-python compiled for python 2.x in python 3.x, or vice versa. Check which python interpreter you are running against which PYTHONPATH / sys.path is used.

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