When something is running as a daemon what does that mean?

"When something is running as a daemon what does that mean?"

Here is a good definition of daemon.

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;...text=Daemon%20(computer%20software)


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Steve Stites

When something is running as a Daemon . it means its a program which is running in background & running all the time untill you gracefully stops it.

Now second part... This program which is running in background offers service to whtever it meant for.

e.g. VSFTPD being a daemon, keeps running untill you gracefully stops it or by the time its running it will keep offering you a service of FTP( file transfer protocol) & loging to FTP to use its service.

So thts wht we call as DAEMON.

A daemon runs in the backgound ( & ) , detached from the terminal (nohup) eg:
nohup daemon &
Note that it doesn't have to offer services, but services usually are daemons...

Ooooh, you mean like an Incubus or a Succubus offers you their services?

I'm actually interested in how that term came about for the computer world, anyway. How is it that someone decided to call a service/process that hangs around until you need it a "daemon"? Why not "genie"? Or "attendant"? Or "Succubus"? ;-D

My dictionary defines daemon as "a spirit holding a middle place between gods and men, a good genius". UNIX is God, so it seems pretty appropriate to me. I did hear, many years ago, and probably an urban legend, of a religious organisation who took delivery of a UNIX system but refused to use it when they discovered there were daemons running inside it.

Wikipedia never fails.

Is there any more divisive issue today in the IT community? You say Deemun, I say Daymun, I say tomayto, you say tomahto.

The actual origin of the term daemon or more correctly, d©¡mon, is generally accepted to be the "ministering spirit" that Socrates claimed guided his explorations into the nature of the life, the universe, and everything. In the Greek, this word is ¥ä¥á¥é¥ì¥ø¥í. transliterated to English as "daimon" -- pronounced "dye-moan".

The Greek word for children, ¥ð¥á¥é¥ä¥é¥á, pronounced "pie-dee-a" is the source of our English words "encyclop©¡dia" and "p©¡diatrician" -- or for my fellow Americans, "encyclopedia" and "pediatrician" -- which demonstrates that the Greek "¥á¥é" became "©¡" in English -- originally a seperate letter letter of the alphabet, not to be confused with the vowel combination "ae". However most people do not know how to type ©¡, so it ends up as ae in most English words.

The physicist James Clerk Maxwell adopted the term d©¡mon in his investigation of the laws of thermodynamics, to refer to the "agent" that controlled the"gate" at a narrow opening through which gasses were exchanged at the molecular level. This may be how it worked its way into the techie lexicon.

When it boils right down to it though, there truly is no "correct" pronunciation for any word, only a "standard" or generally accepted one, which fluctuates over time. The dictionary in the final analysis does not dictate how a word shall be pronounced, it can only report how it IS being pronounced. Controlling the direction of evolution of the mother tongue is rather like pushing a rope,

There was a time a century or so ago when the generally accepted pronunciation of the word "piano" in my part of the US was "pie-annie", but that edition of the word has fallen into disuse in favor of the more urbane "pee-ann-oh", which in turn probably drives Europeans batty because we Americans do not say pee-ah-no, which is the original pronunciation.

Every spring I have the annual discussion with the wife over whether the flowers called peonies are pronounced "pineys" or the (ahem) CORRECT pronunciation, "pee-oh-nees"

The point is not whether there is a "correct" way to say daemon, but whether in saying it, the idea expressed by it is understood, or whether a competing but similar pronunciation denotes something entirely different. Whether you say "demon" or "daymon", I still know what you are talking about.

<very dryly> I wouldn't go that far by a long shot. But I get your general drift.

On the issue of pronunciation: I say "DAY-mon" (daemon)