The word daemon is derived from the Greek word daimon, meaning a "supernatural being" or "spirit", rather than demon, referring to the fallen angels or followers of Satan. Some would insist that Unix is infested with both daemons and demons. In Unix, daemons are typically started by the root process when the operating system is initialized, and run in the background indefinitely. Daemons typically spend most of their time waiting for an event or period when they will perform some task. Examples of common Internet daemons include WU-Ftpd, Apache, BIND, and Sendmail. These particular daemon programs are responsible in part for making the Internet useful, but daemons also serve other purposes that are not as visible to users. In this tutorial, we'll learn how easy it is to turn a Perl script into a daemon process.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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