13.8. Summary

Daemon processes are running all the time on most UNIX systems. Initializing our own process to run as a daemon takes some care and an understanding of the process relationships that we described in Chapter 9. In this chapter, we developed a function that can be called by a daemon process to initialize itself correctly.

We also discussed the ways a daemon can log error messages, since a daemon normally doesn't have a controlling terminal. We discussed several conventions that daemons follow on most UNIX systems and showed examples of how to implement some of these conventions.