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A mysterious '~' directory recently appeared inside my home directory (as in ~/~). Inside I found a single hidden directory .confit which contained a single directory chromium. Inside that ~/~/.confit/chromium directory were several of the same contents as ~/.config/chromium. I have been using Chromium for years and this is the first time I have seen this behavior. Has anyone else encountered this? I can delete the '~' directory but it comes back every time I launch Chromium. I wish I could identify exactly when it started, but I have already deleted it several times and I don't remember exactly when it first appeared. What determines where Chromium saves its config files? server-side settings? source code? I don't even know where to look. I'm running Arch Linux in case that matters.

Edit: Is it possible that the error could be in my configs for an Electron app rather than Chromium itself?

Edit: $CHROME_CONFIG_HOME is not set and I set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to /home/(my username)/.config when I was first troubleshooting this issue. It didn't change anything.

Jack Indaboks
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    Check your environment (env) for anything with ~ in the value. – D. SM Oct 30 '20 at 04:33
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    If you use ~ in any of the dotfiles, it may need to be replaced with $HOME. – D. SM Oct 30 '20 at 04:34
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    It's not only the initial ~ but also the confit where t is close to g on the keyboard, and this is an indication for a typo while doing some activity, for example like this. Also it seems that no other program is writing anything under that directory, so I don't expect this issue to come from a system global variable but from something Chromium specific. – thanasisp Oct 30 '20 at 16:19
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    Also see here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/62.0.3202.58/docs/user_data_dir.md#linux and report if you have set $CHROME_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. – thanasisp Oct 30 '20 at 16:22
  • What determines where Chromium saves its config files? See link above. It is a configurable setting for the program. The default value is ~/.config but also it is allowed to be overwritten. – thanasisp Oct 31 '20 at 04:45
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    what about a bruteforce approach? fgrep -r .confit ~ ? – A.B Nov 04 '20 at 16:26
  • That bruteforce approach would have saved me a lot of time, I'll have to remember that for next time. What I ended up doing was a more manual version of the same thing, using grep file by file. I guess I should learn my tools better. Thanks! – Jack Indaboks Nov 04 '20 at 16:30

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I found it. User error sure enough. My i3 config file was the culprit. I had keybindings set to launch chromium with flag --user-data-dir=~/.confit/chromium/... Really obvious in hindsight. Changed it to --user-data-dir=$HOME/.config/chromium/... and it works correctly now. Thanks for all the help!

Jack Indaboks
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    Apart from the typo, the problem is that even if the command is launched through a shell, the tilde won't be expanded there, in the middle of a word. Bash would expand it after the = in something that "looks like" a shell assignment. But --foo=~/bar doesn't fit that because the dashes aren't valid in a shell variable name. – ilkkachu Nov 04 '20 at 17:10
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    Yeah I forgot to mention that in my original answer. Updated it now. Thanks for the clarification! – Jack Indaboks Nov 04 '20 at 21:19
  • When I try to use a data-dir in a path with a '.' in it, I get Failed to create a ProcessSingleton for your profile directory. snap run chromium --user-data-dir=$HOME/foo/chromium-W3C/ works, but mv foo .foo; snap run chromium --user-data-dir=$HOME/.foo/chromium-W3C/ fails. I'm jealous that you get to use the customary .config dir. – ericP Feb 03 '22 at 14:31