Daemons - Daemon does not stand for Disk and Execution Monitor (http://www.takeourword.com/TOW146/page4.html). They are the processes which run in the background and are not interactive. They have no controlling terminal.

They perform certain actions at predefined times or in response to certain events. In *NIX, the names of daemons end in d.

Services - In Windows, daemons are called services.

If you're wondering why *NIX has a command named service, it is just used to run init scripts (shorthand for initialization scriptrunlevel).

Process - Process is a running program. At a particular instant of time, it can be either running, sleeping, or zombie (completed process, but waiting for it's parent process to pick up the return value).

Sources and further information:

• http://www.linfo.org/daemon.html


• http://kb.iu.edu/data/aiau.html


• http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/daemon.html


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_%28computing%29


• http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name=MContent&pageid=84