Daemon and Service Difference

Question

What is the difference between daemon and service ? (In windows or Linux).

My definition (maybe others disagree?) is that a Linux service is specifically a System V-style script located in `/etc/init.d`. A daemon can be any program that runs as a true daemon, i.e. a background process and not attached to any tty. — mauzel, Jan 25 '15 at 18:45
For a more complete discussion check this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3612846/what-are-the-behavioral-differences-between-a-daemon-and-a-normal-process And https://askubuntu.com/questions/192058/what-is-technical-difference-between-daemon-service-and-process — Rot-man, Mar 01 '19 at 15:31

score 36 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 11 '17 at 13:13

A daemon is a background, non-interactive program. It is detached from the keyboard and display of any interactive user. The word daemon for denoting a background program is from the Unix culture; it is not universal.

A service is a program which responds to requests from other programs over some inter-process communication mechanism (usually over a network). A service is what a server provides. For example, the NFS port mapping service is provided as a separate portmap service, which is implemented as the portmapd daemon.

A service doesn't have to be a daemon, but usually is. A user application with a GUI could have a service built into it: for instance, a file-sharing application.

For more details: https://askubuntu.com/questions/192058/what-is-technical-difference-between-daemon-service-and-process

"A service doesn't have to be a daemon, but usually is" which means not interactive by the definition "A daemon is a background, non-interactive program". They are not comparable and service can use daemon process as underlying concept to realise its purpose. Hence in Windows services and daemons are interchangeable — Jpz, Jun 24 '19 at 09:18

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 01 '17 at 04:03

8

Daemons are processes running in the background and are not in your face.They do certain tasks at set times or responds to certain events.

In Windows, daemons are called services.

answered Jan 01 '17 at 04:03

answerSeeker

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At best, your answer is incomplete (i.e. services exist in the Unix and Unix-like realms). – Paradox Apr 05 '22 at 12:29

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 21 '19 at 06:18

Daemon

From wikipedia:

A daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.

For example you want to ping google.com. That means something in your OS should know how to handle the Domain name resolution. That is a daemon.

More to read : Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND)

Service

That name comes from Client Server Model. It means that an application runs as a service on a server, and a client version of the application is used to access the service. For example an Apache HTTP server application is a service on a server and a Chrome Browser is a client on a PC.

Daemon and Service Difference

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