Strictly speaking, a process is an execution environment that contains instructions, user data and system data parts, and other types of resources that are obtained during runtime. On the other hand, a program is a binary file that contains instructions and data that are used for initializing the instruction and user data parts of a process. Each running UNIX process is uniquely identified by an unsigned integer, which is called the process ID of the process.
There are three categories of processes: user processes, daemon processes, and kernel processes. User processes run in user space and usually have no special access rights. Daemon processes are programs that can be found in the user space and run in the background without the need for a terminal. Kernel processes are executed in kernel space only and can fully access all kernel data structures.
