Daemons are programs that continuously listen for other processes. Daemons loosely resemble terminate and stay resident (TSR) programs in the Microsoft platform.These programs remain alive at all times, constantly listening for a particular event. When that event finally occurs, the TSR or Daemon undertakes some action.

What is Inetd Daemon in unix ?

Inetd daemon is the main daemon that listens for all other networking related processes running on unix system.It listens for connection requests from the void and when it receives a request it starts the corresponding process.When it receives a request, it evaluates it. This evaluation seeks to determine one thing only: What service does the requesting machine want? For example, does it want Smtp? If so, inetd starts the SMTP server process.

The behavior of inetd is generally controlled from a file called inetd.conf, located in
the /etc directory in linux and unix platforms.The inetd.conf file is used to specify what
services will be called by inetd. Such services might include FTP, Telnet, SMTP, TFTP,
Finger, Systat, Netstat, or any other processes that you specify.