What is "daemon"

Demon \De"mon\, n. [F. d['e]mon, L. daemon a spirit, an evil spirit, fr. Gr. dai`mwn a divinity; of uncertain origin.]

1. (Gr. Antiq.) A spirit, or immaterial being, holding a middle place between men and deities in pagan mythology.

   The demon kind is of an intermediate nature between the divine and the human.
   --Sydenham.

2. One's genius; a tutelary spirit or internal voice; as, the demon of Socrates. [Often written d[ae]mon.]

3. An evil spirit; a devil.

   That same demon that hath gulled thee thus.
   --Shak.

alternative spelling (in specialized senses) of demon (q.v.). Related: Daemonic.

Etymology 1 n. (context uncommon English) (alternative form of demon English) Etymology 2

n. (context computing Unix English) A process (a running program) that does not have a controlling terminal.

1. n. one of the evil spirits of traditional Jewish and Christian belief [syn: devil, fiend, demon, daimon]

2. a person who is part mortal and part god [syn: demigod]

Dæmon is the Latin word for the Ancient Greek daimōn (δαίμων: “god”, “godlike”, “power”, “fate”) which refers to the daemons of ancient Greek religion and mythology; and of Hellenistic religion and philosophy.

In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon ( or ) is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. 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. For example, [[syslogd]] is the daemon that implements the system logging facility, and sshd is a daemon that services incoming SSH connections.

In a Unix environment, the parent process of a daemon is often, but not always, the init process. A daemon is usually either created 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. In addition, a daemon launched by forking and exiting typically must perform other operations, such as dissociating the process from any controlling terminal (tty). Such procedures are often implemented in various convenience routines such as daemon(3) in Unix.

Systems often start daemons at boot time and serve the function of responding to network requests, hardware activity, or other programs by performing some task. Daemons can also configure hardware (like udevd on some Linux systems), run scheduled tasks (like cron), and perform a variety of other tasks.

A dæmon is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders.

Although dæmons mimic the appearance and behaviour of the animals they resemble perfectly, dæmons are not true animals, and humans, other dæmons, and true animals are able to distinguish them on sight. The faculty or quality that makes this possible is not explained in the books, but it is demonstrated extensively, and is reliable enough to allow humans to distinguish a bird-shaped dæmon within a flock of birds in flight.

Dæmons frequently interact with each other in ways that mirror the behaviour of their humans, such as fighting one another when their humans are fighting, or nuzzling one another when their humans embrace, and such contact between dæmons is unremarkable.

In the Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 fictional universes, the Daemons are malevolent spirits born out of the destructive power called Chaos. The daemons found in both universes are very similar, although the precise natures of their creation and existence vary slightly.

1. redirect Dæmon (His Dark Materials)

Daemon and Freedom comprise a two-part novel by the author Daniel Suarez about a distributed, persistent computer application, The Daemon, that begins to change the real world after the original programmer's death.

• Daemon (2006) ISBN 978-0-9786271-0-2 paperback; (2009) hardcover re-release ISBN 978-0-525-95111-7
• Freedom (2010) ISBN 978-0-525-95157-5

Daemon is a 1985 British horror film about a young man who is possessed by a demon. It was written and directed by Colin Finbow. It starred Susannah York, Bert Parnaby and Arnaud Morell. It is a ghost story set in suburbia. Eleven-year-old Nick movies into a large old house with is sisters Jennie and Clare, left in the care of Helga the Swedish au pair while their parents are away in America. Nick is unhappy at his new school, where he is befriended by a boy called Sam and intimidated by scripture teacher Mr Crabb, who is interested in the occult and demonology. Nick hears voices in the house and receives messages on his computer screen (a new touch in 1986); he also suffers inexplicable blisters on his feet and grazes on his elbows and knees. When he dreams of burning and wakes up in a bed full of ashes, Nick tells a psychiatrist (Susannah York in a Mum-like name-value cameo) that he feels he is possessed by a demon. Three of his schoolmates agree and, when Crabb dies in a freak accident, resolve to drive a stake through his heart. However, the cause of the haunting turns out to be Tom, a child chimney sweep from 1839 who was burned to death in the house's chimney. After a climactic fire, Tom's skeleton is discovered in the old fireplace and the ghost is laid to rest.

The symptoms that Nick and his friend interpret as those of demonic possession the blisters, grazes and fiery nightmares actually turn out to be down to his psychic sympathy with Tom, who was burned alive while crawling up a Victorian chimney. This revelation of human cruelty and injustice lurking within supernatural manifestations allows for a finale that is satisfyingly apocalyptic on a small scale.