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> Simply put, a daemon (pronounced dee-mon) is an intentionally orphaned background process. Additionally, daemons are detached from the terminal in which they’
by pmiller2 6y ago
> Simply put, a daemon (pronounced dee-mon) is an intentionally orphaned background process. Additionally, daemons are detached from the terminal in which they’re spawned, operate without user interaction, and are descendants of the system’s init process.
A memorable way to think about this is that a daemon is a child process whose parent has literally disowned it, forked off, and died.
- JdeBP 6y ago... except that that's most definitely not the defining characteristic, and the defining characteristic is rather that the process isn't part of a login session, which ironically on modern operating systems with all of the one-way trapdoors that now exist one cannot reach by forking. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/606902/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/606902/5132 Thinking that forking makes a dæmon is much the same error as thinking that su drops privileges, it conflates what happend to be a mechanism from years ago with the actual purpose, totally missing that things have changed since (long since, decades ago in fact).
- paledot 6y agoWelp, I've had a lot of emotions about Apache httpd over the years, but this is the first time over felt sorry for it. Poor lil' thing.