I sometimes want to run chromium with a new profile or with a copy of an
existing profile and destroy any changes to the profile at the end of the
session. To do this without relaxing unveil, I put the profile in /tmp, which
chromium has rw access to, and then destroy the profile on exit. It looks
something like this (simplifying from my use case):
```
#!/bin/sh
# Set variable 'src' somewhere (either pass it in or set it somewhere in
# the script) if you don't want a fresh profile every time. This acts as
# a kind of template profile.
src="${HOME}/.config/chromium_a"
temp="$(mktemp -t -d chromium.XXXXXXX)"
if [ -d "$src" ]; then
rsync -a "${src}/" "$temp"
fi
chrome \
--user-data-dir="${temp}" \
--enable-unveil "$@"
# In practice you'll want to either control whether the profile is destroyed
# or provide a knob to sync changes back to src so you can setup or update
# the template profile for your needs. We just destroy it in this example.
if [ -d "$src" ]; then
rm -rf "$temp"
fi
```
On Wed, Jan 29, 2020, at 18:03, Allan Streib wrote:
> Per the man page I have tried to launch chrome with an alternate data
> directory hoping to achieve separate profiles.
>
> $ chrome --user-data-dir=~/.config/chromium_a
>
>
> [75336:1591778608:0129/114259.294272:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(280)]
> Failed to create /home/astreib/.config/chromium_a/SingletonLock: No such file
> or directory (2)
>
> [75336:1591778608:0129/114259.294449:ERROR:chrome_browser_main.cc(1413)]
> Failed to create a ProcessSingleton for your profile directory. This means
> that running multiple instances would start multiple browser processes rather
> than opening a new window in the existing process. Aborting now to avoid
> profile corruption.
> [75336:-995142592:0129/114259.302586:ERROR:cache_util.cc(141)]
> Unable to move cache folder
> /home/astreib/.config/chromium_a/ShaderCache/GPUCache to
> /home/astreib/.config/chromium_a/ShaderCache/old_GPUCache_000
> [75336:-995142592:0129/114259.302696:ERROR:disk_cache.cc(178)]
> Unable to create cache
>
> [75336:-995142592:0129/114259.302721:ERROR:shader_disk_cache.cc(605)]
> Shader Cache Creation failed: -2
>
> I have tried this with ~/.config/chromium_a as an empty directory, and
> as a copy of ~/.config/chromium (which is created successfully when
> chrome is started without any args).
>
> Thought I would ask if this is simply a known problem before I go
> digging too deeply.
>
> amd64 6.6 release with syspatches and pkg updates applied as of today.
>
> Allan
>
>
