Daemonen

Daemonen are the Dutch plural form of daemon and may refer to two main senses: mythological beings in folklore and computing background processes. Etymology: the term derives from the Greek daimón, meaning a guiding or divine spirit, and connects to Latin daemon. In English, the word daemon is distinguished from demon, though their roots are related.

In folklore and religious thought, daimones were intermediary spirits between gods and humans. They could be benevolent guardians, sources of inspiration, or malevolent influences, and their role varied across cultures and periods. In later Christian tradition, some daimones were reframed as demons, while others retained a more ambivalent or protective character in different mythologies.

In computing, a daemon (plural daemons in English; in Dutch, daemonen) is a background program that runs without direct user interaction to provide services such as network access, scheduling tasks, or logging. Daemons typically start at system boot and operate without a user interface, often detaching from the controlling terminal. They are managed by service managers such as systemd or init scripts and run with specific privileges. Common examples include web servers (for example, a daemon like httpd), secure shells (sshd), and job schedulers (crond).

Cultural usage: outside formal definitions, daemonen or daemons appear in science fiction and fantasy as supernatural beings or personifications of abstract forces, reflecting the broad sense of a guiding or active entity.

See also: daemon (disambiguation), demon, daemonization.