At 05:36 PM 7/20/99 -0700, Casey Bralla wrote [in part]:
>Pronounced "day-MON" is a program that runs unattended. (In DOS, it's
>known as a TSR). It usually does some type of control function. For
>example: There is a cron daemon which wakes up every minute and sees
>if you need to run a cron job. It runs in the background, and you
>almost never see it.
A DOS TSR is not quite the same thing as a Unix daemon. Because DOS isn't
multitasking, programs can't really run in the background - you needed a
separate (sort of) multitasker like DesqView to do that. TSRs typically
patched into the keyboard interrupt watcher so each keystroke got scanned to
see if it was intended for a TSR. This was something of a mess when TSRs
first came out, until the makers managed to work out a standard that
(usually) let multiple TSRs cooperate.
A Unix daemon, in contrast, is a true background process, running
independent of any keyboard activity, requesting time from the scheduler as
needed.
BTW, I usually hear it pronounced the same as "demon", though I do also hear
both day-MON and DAY-mon.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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