Second LibreOffice session with different user profile (Win 10)

[Lupp]

For a special project I would like to be able to create a second LibreOffice session with a different user profile. To be clear:

• One Win user, the one I’m every day
• One installed LibO (current, recent)
• First LibO session already running
• Second LibO session, same soffice.exe, accessing a different profile:
  different options, different customisation, different script libraries e.g.

Can this be done?
What I tried based on naive assumptions (and can’t precisely describe at the moment) calling soffice.exe from a command line using -env: with a different path meaning ...\Appdata\Roaming\LibreOffice\alter resulted in reporting a corrupted bootstrap.

The path designated an empty folder.

[karolus]

Hallo

Use URL instead PATH and quote it if there are spaces in path

soffice --writer -env:UserInstallation=file:///home/wolfgang/newfolder/extra/libreoffice/4/

[ajlittoz]

The naive answer would be “create a second user account”. But this means you won’t be able to copy and paste (text) between the sessions. Depending on the user permissions, files can be shared (assuming Windows has the same user/group/world concept).

Under Linux, you can alternate between simultaneous sessions with CtrlAltF_n to “activate” the session on the “n^th” virtual “console”.

With more info on your envisioned workflow, I could be more precise but take note I have lost contact with W$ for a long time.

[Lupp]

@karolus

Use URL instead PATH and quote it if there are spaces in path

I never use spaces in folder names or file names.

@Lupp

…calling soffice.exe from a command line using -env: with a different path meaning…

Sorry. I wasn’t precise. I tried the URL approach as given by the soffice.exe -help , but the empty folder didn’t seem to be accepted…
I will have to continue experiments. I may not have tried thoroughly enough before posting the question.

[karolus]

Try:

soffice  

without …exe

[karolus]

@Lupp

I never use spaces in folder names or file names.

But AFAIK your windows does so stupid things like: …\Dokumente und Einstellungen\…

[Lupp]

@karolus

But AFAIK your windows does so stupid things like: …\Dokumente und Einstellungen\…

No longer this one, however “Program Files”. Yes, they are stupid in a hardly credible way, But if I remember correctly spaces in file-system names were first allowed in Unix and everybody was “glad” that MS DOS 3.x was partly “compatible with Unix”.
Anywav: Before I called soffice.exe from a terminal I had of course already made the ChangeDir.
Sigh! Also of course I must have included some typos with my tests. Now I can have as many LibO sessions with different user profiles as I think to need.
An example that worked for me: soffice.exe -env:UserInstallation=file:///C:/Users/myself/AppData/Roaming/LibreOffice/alter/
Yes. For quite a while now Win also accepts the ordinary slash as the path separator (no mixing!).
Thank you for you valuable participation.
Thanks also to @ajlittoz !

[sokol92]

Hello @Lupp!
Example for Windows 10.

1. Create folder C:\temp (if it doesn’t exist)
2. Run the command:

soffice.exe -env:UserInstallation=file:///c:/Temp/LibreOffice

[Wanderer]

Just as additional reference, a recent thread to use several (temporary) profiles to use parallel convert-to:

--convert-to commands in parallel: possible?

I am aware that it is possible to --convert-to an entire batch of files so that the server/service is not called to life over and over for each file. But I have noticed that my cpu sits far from full usage when the conversions are under way, and I sit on a bottomless pile of docx’s to convert to pdf, so I want to parallellize the batches to make it faster. Is there no way to make this happen? I am on linux, and using the parallel command does not help since the service is only processing one bat…

[KamilLanda]

Under Win10 I ran 2 sessions of Libre via @karolus example in PowerShell. It created new user profile in d:\temp for 2nd session.

cd "c:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program"
.\soffice.exe --writer
.\soffice.exe --writer -env:UserInstallation=file:///d:/temp

[Lupp]

Thanks once more to all!

[erAck]

@Lupp

-env:UserInstallation=file:///C:/Users/myself/AppData/Roaming/LibreOffice/alter/
Yes. For quite a while now Win also accepts the ordinary slash as the path separator

The example is (and for -env:UserInstallation has to be) a file URL though and in URLs the / slash is the only allowed path separator. But yes, otherwise for ordinary paths on the command line Windows should accept / instead of \ for a while…

[Lupp]

@erAck

… Windows should accept / instead of \ for a while…

… by special grace? Nice.