user-data-dir with leading period not writable by Chromium - bug?

[Nick Fenwick]

Hi all, I'm new to posting here so please excuse any impropriety.  Problem with "Version 78.0.3904.108 (Official Build) snap (64-bit)" on Ubuntu 19.10.

For many years I've used --user-data-dir to launch Chrome and Chromium with profiles specific to the project or client I use.  For the last while, perhaps since upgrading Ubuntu from 18.04 to 19.10, it has failed to start with:

$ chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/home/neek/.chromium-profiles/test
Gtk-Message: 17:44:03.882: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:44:03.883: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[18240:18466:1203/174403.915885:ERROR:cache_util.cc(141)] Unable to move cache folder /home/neek/.chromium-profiles/test/ShaderCache/GPUCache to /home/neek/.chromium-profiles/test/ShaderCache/old_GPUCache_000
[18240:18466:1203/174403.915915:ERROR:disk_cache.cc(178)] Unable to create cache
[18240:18466:1203/174403.915931:ERROR:shader_disk_cache.cc(601)] Shader Cache Creation failed: -2
[18240:18240:1203/174403.999252:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(280)] Failed to create /home/neek/.chromium-profiles/test/SingletonLock: Permission denied (13)
[18240:18240:1203/174403.999343:ERROR:chrome_browser_main.cc(1419)] 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.

I had thought this was a simple permissions error but my home directory is correct (owned by user neek, group neek and normal rwx permissions for user) and ditto into the profile folder.  I tried completely removing the profile folder and the same kinds of errors occurred.

After quite a lot of trial and error, it seems that any folder with a leading period, such as my '.chromium-profiles' folder above, leads to an error.  For example, trying to use '/home/neek/arse' and '/home/neek/.arse' gives different behaviour:

$ chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/home/neek/arse/test
Gtk-Message: 17:49:11.206: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:49:11.208: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[22295:1:1203/174912.155066:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.
[22295:1:1203/174912.155639:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.
$ mkdir .arse
$ chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/home/neek/.arse/test
Gtk-Message: 17:49:19.426: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:49:19.427: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[22367:22367:1203/174919.444736:ERROR:simple_message_box_views.cc(139)] Unable to show a dialog outside the UI thread message loop: Failed To Create Data Directory - Chromium cannot read and write to its data directory:

/home/neek/.arse/test
[22724:1:1203/174920.640829:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.
[22724:1:1203/174920.641500:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.

I found https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-bugs/wJY2K9fdRfk where they talk about a bug a few years ago where spaces in the profile directory caused similar error output.

Can anyone confirm this?

[PhistucK]

If this is reproducible with Chrome (not Chromium, because Chromium might be modified by your distribution) -

You can search crbug.com for an existing issue and star it. If you cannot find one, file a new issue using the "New issue" link on the same page.

Please, do not add a "+1" or "Me too" or "Confirmed" (or similar) comment. It just wastes the time of Chrome engineers and sends unnecessary e-mails to all of the people who starred the issue.

You can reply with a link to the found or created issue and might get triaged (and fixed) faster.

Thank you.

☆PhistucK

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