Dragon
[MIT] A program similar to a
daemon, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks.
A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, etc.
Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy or the Enterprise), which was generated by the "name dragon".
Use is rare outside
MIT, under
Unix and most other
operating systems this would be called a "background
demon" or
daemon.
The best-known Unix example of a dragon is
cron.
At
SAIL, they called this sort of thing a "phantom".
[
Jargon File]
