39. Why are there two copies of upsmon running?

It’s not really two complete copies if your OS forks efficiently.

By default, upsmon runs most of the grunt work as an unprivileged user and keeps a stub process around with root powers that can only shut down the system when necessary. This should make it much harder to gain root in the event a hole is ever discovered in upsmon.

If this really bothers you and you like running lots of code as root, start upsmon with -p and it will go back to being one big process. This is not recommended, so don’t blame us if something bad happens in this mode.