The Life And Death of A Daemon Daemons are always running. They are launched as part of the system's bootstrapping process and go down when the system shuts down. It is usually possible to launch daemons "by hand" from the command line, for debugging purposes. However, there is no standard way to do this. The two main ways to launch daemons are: The system start up scripts (/etc/rc.d/*), and The inetd superdaemon. To learn more about the /etc/rc.d/*, look at the club's init scripts lecture. The inetd superdaemon is configured by /etc/inetd.conf (to learn more, man inetd.conf)