Trouble Spawning a Shell

I’ve been working on some of the examples out of the Hacking: The Art of Exploitation book which exploit a program with shellcode but I’m not having much luck. The exploit makes sense conceptually but I can’t get it to spawn the shellcode.

It uses the system() function to invoke the exploitable program from the shell with the payload as a commandline arg. I want to look at the stack in GDB of the command being invoked by the system() function … does anyone know how to do this or know if it’s even possible?

It’s possible for me to look at the stack when I pass the arguments myself from the commandline but the system() function is doing it instead cause it’s easier to construct the shellcode programmatically.

I also looked at the return value of the system() function and it’s zero meaning that the program exited normally. I’m curious if the somehow the command payload isn’t getting passed correctly so I was hoping to look at the stack…

Update
My problems were related to trying to execute the exploit on a 64-bit system when the code was developed for 32-bit. After switching over to a 32-bit OS, I was able to spawn a shell no problem!