From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Aug 30 08:25:26 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C75B916A4BF for ; Sat, 30 Aug 2003 08:25:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from falcon.midgard.homeip.net (h76n3fls20o913.bredband.comhem.se [213.67.148.76]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 70D6643FB1 for ; Sat, 30 Aug 2003 08:25:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ertr1013@student.uu.se) Received: (qmail 81749 invoked by uid 1001); 30 Aug 2003 15:25:21 -0000 Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 17:25:21 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson To: Hendrik Hasenbein Message-ID: <20030830152521.GA54379@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> Mail-Followup-To: Hendrik Hasenbein , Vitali Malicky , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <1e2.f3352ba.2c81bfb8@aol.com> <005e01c36ef5$c9b17900$2401010a@zone3000.net> <3F50B100.1020601@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3F50B100.1020601@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org cc: Vitali Malicky Subject: Re: Newer names X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 15:25:26 -0000 On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 04:13:20PM +0200, Hendrik Hasenbein wrote: > Vitali Malicky wrote: > >What about DRAGON? There is also such a term as DRAGON. Yes, I'm all > >serious. cron is a DRAGON, for example. DRAGON is a process which may run > >other processes periodically under a user specified. What about it? And > >many > >my colleagues, and me as well, refer to it also as PROCESS. > You've made me curious. Can you explain me the acronym DRAGON? Or did > you just make that up? 'Dragon' is not an acronym. It is just a name. 'Daemon' is not an acronym either despite what some people tell you. The expansion 'Disk And Execution MONitor' was made up after the term 'daemon' had come in use, and should not be used. 'Dragon' is essentially an older and not as widespread term for what is today known as a 'daemon' in the Unix world. For more information about the terms 'dragon' and 'daemon' you can see the the entries for those words in the Jargon File at http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon and you can also see http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html for information on how and whay the word 'daemon' came into use in computing. As for 'process', dragons and daemons are examples of processes, but there are many processes that are neither a dragon nor a daemon, so 'daemon' and 'process' are not synonymous, and changing all uses of 'daemon' into 'process' would lose quite a bit of precision in the language and is therefore not a good idea. -- Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se