dragon

n. [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. Usage:
rare outside MIT under Unix and most other OSes this would be called a
background demon or daemon. The best-known Unix example of a dragon is cron
(1). At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a phantom. Prev  Up  Next Dr.

