As you may already know it is possible to create different profiles for Chromium. You can find out more information about that in http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles.

What I was really interested to find out was how can I start Chromium with one of these profiles, instead of using the last one that was loaded. The answer can be found here: http://superuser.com/questions/377186/how-do-i-start-chrome-using-a-specified-user-profile. Unfortunately the man page for chromium does not list the specified option so it was really nice to find this question in superuser.com! But let me just give an example of how to use it under Linux.

In my setup (I am using Debian 7.0 with Chromium Version 26.0.1410.43) I have created two Profiles let’s say Foo and Bar.  The default location where Chromium stores the profile data is under your home directory in ~/.config/chromium. Each profile that you create creates a new folder under this directory named “Profile X” where X is 1 for the first profile, 2 for the second and so on.

In the Chromium settings though your profiles are not named like that (unless you named them like that). So in my example setup in the Chromium settings the profiles are named Foo and Bar. In order to find out which profile corresponds to which profile folder you can have a look in the Preferences file from within the profile folders. There, under the profile section you will see the name of the profile as you typed it in the settings page.  So, let’s assume that “Profile 1” = Foo and “Profile 2” = Bar.

So now that you know which Profile folder goes with each of your profiles you can start Chromium from the command line like:

chromium --profile-directory="Profile 1"

when you want to start Chromium using the Foo profile and

chromium --profile-directory="Profile 2"

when you want to start Chromium using the Bar profile.