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Sometimes it is desirable to have program run continuously in the background. This is daemon mode. Most daemons sit quietly, waiting for some kind of event, such as a network request.
Distribution: BeOS, BSD, Caldera, CTOS, Debian, LFS, Mac, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, Solaris, SuSE
Posts: 1,761
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Any process running in the background or foreground has a PID whether that process is short or long lived.
A "daemon" is just a name associated with service programs that run in the background that typically perform a function (DNS, DHCP, HTTP, etc.)
CRON can start service programs as well as the typical timed event short lived script task.
So, if your program will perform a service and will need to stay long lived, then consider it a daemon. If on the other hand it will perform a short lived process, then it's a task.
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