What is a daemon?

In Unix and some other operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs in the background, It is not under the direct control of a user.

They are usually initiated as background processes. Daemons have names that end with the letter "d".

E.g. syslogd, sshd

In a Unix, the parent process of a daemon is usually the init process (PID=1). Processes usually become daemons by forking a child process and then having their parent process immediately exit, thus causing init to adopt the child process.

What is a daemon?

Daemon is a program that runs in the background without user’s interaction. A daemon runs in a multitasking operating system like UNIX. A daemon is initiated and controlled by special programs known as ‘processes’. Usually daemons have a suffix letter‘d’. For instance, ‘syslogd’, a daemon for handling the system log.