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daemon and process

what is the difference between them? I noticed that in "system-config-services", the process has an pid number, while the items marked as "daemon" have no pid. anyone can tell me more about this thanx!

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    bighornsheepbighornsheep Member Posts: 1,506
    a daemon is a listener. A service, usually a server of some sort. ie. Apache, MySQL, Samba, etc...

    A daemon runs in the background, ie. OS Supervisor-mode.
    A process runs in the foreground, ie. OS User-mode.
    Jack of all trades, master of none
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    bighornsheepbighornsheep Member Posts: 1,506
    Extra info:

    newer versions of Linux probably doesnt work this way anymore.

    But in Operating System Design, a daemon is by definition a process that is started directly in supervisor mode, bypassing the fork() system call, thus it doesnt have a Process ID. A process however requires access to the kernel via a system call running in supervisor-mode, usually requiring the fork() system call to generate a Process ID.

    In OS design, the OS is actually:
    1) The kernel
      memory management, process management, Intput/Output, file system
    2) supervisor-space
      drivers etc.
    3) user-space
      applications programs

    In *theory*, Microsoft Windows doesnt have a supervisor space, and everything is in user-space, there are however APIs to bridge user-space and kernel.
    Jack of all trades, master of none
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    blackzoneblackzone Member Posts: 82 ■■□□□□□□□□
    I just call daemon "back ground process". It's just a process that you can't interact with after it start.

    Daemon does have a process ID(at least under Linux), type "ps -ax" and you should be able to see the PID.

    Below is an unofficial link to give more info
    http://www.unixguide.net/unix/programming/1.7.shtml
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