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Using Lubuntu and its Task Manager (LXTask) I noticed that some instances of Chromium are running as user root. I was kinda shocked because I am always reading only system relevant software should run with root privileges.

I have been googling like crazy about this but found nothing.Only some older stuff about people who wanted to run Chromium/Chrome as root !?

So I'm thinking this is the way it is supposed to be ? But why ? Firefox is running only one instance as the user who invoked it. (I get the reason for Chrome's multiple processes. I've read it on their site.)

Can anybody clear this up for me, it really bugs me and prevents me from using Chromium ? I would really appreciate it! Thanks in advance.

This is the output of ps -ef | grep -i chromium :

myname@xyxyxy:~$ ps -ef | grep -i chromium
myname       1785     1  0 23:03 ?        00:00:02 /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser
myname       1788  1785  0 23:03 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser
myname       1790     1  0 23:03 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --type=zygote
myname       1813  1790  0 23:03 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --type=renderer

Well,no root processes. I am more confused.

Here is a link to the LXTask screenshot LXTask Sorry for the smudge. I am a little paranoid, hence the fuzz :)

enter image description here

So, is it just LXTask showing the wrong thing ?

Sorry for the long stayaway but I had to sleep.Thank you fossfreedom for clearing this up. I am much calmer now. The 'ps -ef | grep ' did exactly what you said.I will try to report it as a bug. Thanks also @Lekensteyn. Oh, and also @CYREX for embedding the pic.

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  • very curious - I've just run ps -ef | grep -i chromium and all processes are running as the logged in user. Can you do the same and copy and paste the results into your question?
    – fossfreedom ♦
    Aug 12, 2011 at 20:53
  • Use htop (press F5) to determine where the process came from. On my systems, no Chromium instance is running as root.
    – Lekensteyn
    Aug 12, 2011 at 20:54

1 Answer 1

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LXTask looks like it is showing the incorrect user.

Scroll to the right and you'll see two further columns - PID and PPID. These are the process ID and the parent process ID.

If you do a ps -ef | grep <PID> you'll see that the owner of the errant "root" processes is actually yourself.

I would file this as a bug on LaunchPad - ubuntu-bug lxtask

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