From sangeeth george on Tue, 18 Jan 2000
sir,
i am sangeeth george, doing my final year Btech.in information technology.recently i came across a new topic(which not actually a new one but i came to know only recently)called "Daemons".since then i had been fetching for materials to learn more about it.but i couldn't find any worthy one.can u help me in getting more info about this topic. i've got a lot of doubts about it and i would like to share with you.some of them are,
A daemon under UNIX (and some other operating systems) is a program which runs in the background, has no controlling terminal (is detached) and is (under UNIX and Linux) in it's own process group.
Other than those (relatively minor and technical) details it is just a program.
I've heard that the term originally was 'dmon' from Multics, or ITS or some other predecessor to UNIX. I guess it stood for "device monitor."
However, since I'm on my Debian box, which has a 'dict' client, and a 'dictd' (dictionary daemon) and several freely available lexicons installed I'll just yank in a definition from that:
[using my xemacs macro equivalent of vi's :r!dict daemon]
From Jargon File (4.0.0/24 July 1996) [jargon]:
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
It's obvious that the Jargon file and FOLDOC entries are basically the same. I believe that the Jargon entry was adopted by FOLDOC.
1.It is possible for us to retrieve the commands that we have entered in a shell promptusing 'uparrow key'.Is it due to the action of Daemons . if yes,name of that daemon?
What you're describing is a feature of some of the common UNIX/Linux command shells. It is not done through any sort of daemon.
2. in one of the magazine i've read that Daemons are much more powerful than TSR ,as Tsr need some user intervention.is it true?can u give an eg. for that.
That is hogwash. The old MS-DOS print spooler TSR (terminate/stay resident) was about as close to a daemon as you can get under MS-DOS (serving almost the same function as the lpd line printer daemon under Linux and the BSD UNIX').
3.surely there must be some kind of difference exsists between ordinary programs and daemons in the INSTALLATION part ,since daemons are executed by system itself . can you explain me how to(where to)install a program if we want it to act as a Daemon.
No. Daemons can be started by any user at any time under UNIX. A daemon is just a program that detaches itself from it's controlling terminal (by closing STDIN, standard input, STDOUT, standard output, and STDERR, standard error file descriptors) and using the setpgrp() system call to set itself into a separate process group.
Most daemons on most UNIX systems are started by the init process (either directly, via /etc/inittab, or through one of the rc*) scripts during the boot process.
The most common daemons are:
- inetd:
- "Dispatcher" --- starts other daemons in response to network connections on well known service (WKS) ports as specified in the /etc/inetd.conf and the /etc/services files.
- sendmail:
- Handles SMTP,
competitors: qmail and Postfix- init:
- "Father of all processes" --- it starts all of the rc* scripts, and it monitors all terminals, and consoles forcing new getty and xdm processes on them as login sessions are ended.
- httpd:
- Web server daemon.
- cron:
- Scheduler: this keeps a list of commands to be run at given intervals. cron performs most of the routine system maintenance
- atd:
- The at service used to be managed by cron (there was a cron job that ran every minute to execute any outstanding at jobs). However, recently (a couple years ago) at was set into a separate daemon in most Linux distributions. This is particularly useful on laptops where the old method would keep the disk drives spinning unnecessarily.
- lpd:
- print spool server
... et cetera.
4.what really is the importance of Daemons in new world (say E-commerce)?(i raised this question since i may most probably take a seminar on this topic)
There is nothing special about daemons.
What is the importance of background jobs in e-commerce and the "new world?" They are just programs. Likewise for daemons.
kindly provide me anwsers to these questions + any website from where i can learn more about it.
You need a basic book on UNIX.
expecting an early reply from you.
thanking you
sangeeth george t
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