Meaning – The term qdaemon, refers to a process that maintains a list of outstanding jobs and sends them to the specified device at the appropriate time.
Traditionally, the process names of a daemon end with the letter d, for clarification that the process is in fact a daemon, and for differentiation between a daemon and a normal computer program.
Systems often start daemons at boot time that will respond to network requests, hardware activity, or other programs by performing some task. Daemons such as cron may also perform defined tasks at scheduled times.
In a Unix environment, the parent process of a daemon is often, but not always, the init process. A daemon is usually created either by a process forking a child process and then immediately exiting, thus causing init to adopt the child process, or by the init process directly launching the daemon.
Example of usage – “On Microsoft Windows NT systems, programs called Windows services perform the functions of daemons. They run as processes, usually do not interact with the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and maybe launched by the operating system at boot time.”
