Daemons

daemons -- the name comes from the old Greek, meaning something close to "helpful spirit" -- are programs that run in the background, doing helpful little things like running a background process. Programs that are run as daemons will (usually) have a "d" appended to their name, e.g., sshd, named, etc. In windows these are known as services or background processes -- you may also see them referred to this way in unix contexts.