Gdb in one command

I don't think the permission denied is necessarily talking about the traditional permissions bits (rwx..), rather I'd be suspicious of something like SELinux or AppArmor which might be denying your process access.

I do not have access to a ArchLinux system but there is something similar under Fedora that is discussed here in this Fedora Wiki topic: Features/SELinuxDenyPtrace.

Here they're blocking access to ptrace through SELinux, so you might want to try disabling either SELinux or AppArmor is ArchLinux happens to be using either.

What your attempting worked for me

I tried you code on my Fedora 19 system and other than needing to install some addtional debuginfo RPMs it worked as you'd expect it to.

Example

Compiled your code.

$ gcc -g test.c 

Ran the resulting binary in gdb.

$ gdb a.out 
GNU gdb (GDB) Fedora 7.6.1-46.fc19
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /home/saml/tst/106912/a.out...done.
(gdb) break main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x40053f: file test.c, line 4.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /home/saml/tst/106912/a.out 

Breakpoint 1, main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffd698) at test.c:4
4       printf("1\n");
Missing separate debuginfos, use: debuginfo-install glibc-2.17-20.fc19.x86_64
(gdb) quit
A debugging session is active.

    Inferior 1 [process 13341] will be killed.

Quit anyway? (y or n) y

The debugger complained that I was missing the debuginfos for glibc so I installed them.

$ sudo debuginfo-install glibc-2.17-20.fc19.x86_64

Now when I re-run gdb.

$ gdb a.out 
GNU gdb (GDB) Fedora 7.6.1-46.fc19
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /home/saml/tst/106912/a.out...done.
(gdb) break main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x40053f: file test.c, line 4.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /home/saml/tst/106912/a.out 

Breakpoint 1, main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffd698) at test.c:4
4       printf("1\n");
(gdb) 

The problem is probably that the gdb server output is being blocked because no one reads it, so the gdb client is also blocked. You can get expect to read and ignore the rest of the output from gdb with

expect_background eof exit

which makes the last spawned command continue with its output until end-of-file is read.