Daemon
A long-running background service process, typically started by the OS or a supervisor rather than an interactive user.
Definition
A daemon is a long-running background process that provides a service.
Unlike an interactive process, a daemon is usually started by the OS at boot, or by a supervisor, and it keeps running until it is stopped, restarted, or crashes.
What makes it operationally different
Daemons often have:
- structured logging to files or stdout
- configuration reload behavior (often tied to
SIGHUPon Unix) - defined shutdown behavior (signals, graceful shutdown timeouts)