This is gonna seem really silly to almost evryone here - but I need to know :

what is a daemon process?

Thanks

A daemon process has no controlling terminal. It cannot open /dev/tty. If you do a "ps -ef" and look at the tty field, all daemons will have a ? for the tty.

Most daemons tend to last a long time, be owned by root, and do something useful. But you really can't count on any of these thing being true.

The lack of a controlling terminal is the real defining characteristic.

So bacically, they are a typoe of monitor process but dont actually do anything..... Or am I way off the mark here????

You're way off the mark. Asking what a daemon does in like asking what a program does....the answer depends on the specific example.

cron, inetd, syslogd all run as daemons and they do a lot. But it is easy to write a daemon that does nothing but just monitor something. It's also easy to write a daemon that does nothing at all.

For simple unix programmers like me, a daemon is just a process that runs in the background, usually waiting for something to happen that it is capable of working with, like a printer daemon is waiting for print commands.

Cheers guys - that explains the daemon issue for me....

This paper may help give you some more
insights into daemon process programming...
http://skywalker.mis.boun.edu.tr/~karakas/daemon.php