When you say RelWithDebInfo doesn't let you run the shell, can you be more specific as to what you're experiencing?

Yeah, so I set the daemon as "set startup project" and then put a breakpoint in main and then run with f5. This opens up a window that runs osqueryi (as that is a part of the solution too). While running queries in this window, I want to see which functions it touches and am unable to do that in Release mode or the RelWithDebInfo mode

The best way to do this is to set the daemon project as the startup project, then set debugging values of

-S

in the "active" profile, with the profile set to RelWithDebInfo, and then you can debug away. Typically the best way to debug these things though, is figure out which virtual table you're wanting to investigate and set breakpoints in the

gen

functions of that table.