What is Daemon?

In computing, a Daemon is a program that runs continuously to check for incoming requests. It is running on the operating system level. It does different acts on the type of request it recieves.

How the daemon process handles requests:

When requests come to a daemon process, it responds to these requests directly or directs the request to another process, or sometimes it creates a new process to handle some requests and these processes will be destroyed automatically after use.

What kind of operating system daemon process require:

Daemons require special services from the operating system, so they behave slightly different from one operating system to another operating system. They only run in multitasking operating system. They have also implemented in MS Windows. In Windows they are often referred as Windows Services instead of Daemon processes.

How the daemon name is adopted:

MIT programmers thought that demon would be a good name for a background service to work in the background tirelessly.

Example of daemon process:

If a email is recieved from a network, the TCP/IP module on the host computer looks up for the port number, i.e., 80 port is assigned to HTTP, so when a message recieved with that port number, the TCP/IP module sends signal to HTTPd (a daemon process to handle http requests). There are several daemon processes running on the operating system. Some of the daemon processes are listed down:

1. init: This is the first daemon process starts when the Unix boots, and it spawns all other processes.

2. inetd: This super-daemon listens for internet requests on a designated port number and spawns the appropriate server program to handle them. Services handled by inetd include rlogin, telnet, ftp, talk and finger.

3. crond: This daemon executes scheduled commands.

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