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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.
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