Unix Daemons

A daemon is a process that runs in the background. This means that it's usually not involved in dealing directly with a user that is currently using the computer. Usually, daemons wait for some sort of activity that they then deal with. For example, a web server is a daemon that waits for a connection to the computer on port 80. Then, the web server will respond with the requested page from a web site.

Other examples of daemons include

• SSH server
• Mail server (waits for
• syslog daemon (waits for something to log from programs and then writes it to the system log files)