Dragon
/dra-gən/
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'.