Daemons

There's a saying - 'The devil is at his strongest while we're looking the other way.'

Like a program running in the background silently. While we're busy doing other shit. 'Daemons,' they call them. They perform action without user interaction. Monitoring, logging, notifications....

- Elliot Alderson

What Are Daemons?

Pronounced as day-mons. Daemons are processes that run in the background. They are usually used to perform tasks that are not directly related to the user. For example, a daemon might be used to monitor a network connection and log the traffic.

Identifying Your Daemons

A simple way of identifying daemons on your linux system is to run the pstree command.

pstree

Summoning Your Daemons

You can summon your daemons by running the service command.

service <daemon> start
service <daemon> stop
service <daemon> restart
service <daemon> status

Want to spin up a daemon?

sudo systemctl start <daemon>
sudo systemctl stop <daemon>
sudo systemctl restart <daemon>
sudo systemctl status <daemon>

Finally using systemd you can manage your daemons. A quick boot up daemon example has already been published by me here - Running Scripts On Boot.

Final Thoughts

A quick way to identify daemons even includes looking at the suffix of services. If it ends with a d it's a daemon.

Examples:

• mysqld
• systemd
• httpd
• sshd

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