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]