daemon /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ n.
[from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor'] A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). [...] Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals.
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