Is there a difference between a daemon and a service?

daemons and services are one in the same.

However, neither have to be bound to a port. HALd is a daemon, that monitors plugged in hardware and mounts it properly. crond is a daemon that keeps the trains on time.


Daemons and Services are not the same.

A "Service" could refer to either a Daemon or a Service.

A daemon is a subset of services that always run in memory waiting to service a request.

A non-daemon service generally is handled by xinetd. xinetd listens for the request, then starts the required service to handle the request. After the request has been serviced the service is then stopped again.

Typical non-daemon services: rsync vsftpd

Typical daemonized services: MySQL Apache


Yes - daemons run on Unix-like boxes, and services run on Windows.

Once upon a decade ago, daemons kept going indefinitely and services didn't.

Once upon a couple of decades ago, daemons didn't keep going indefinitely either.

So, really, I meant No - there isn't a significant difference between services and daemons.

Note that 'cron' is a daemon; it is not bound to the network at all.