Real life use of doubly linked list

In many operating systems, the thread scheduler (the thing that chooses what processes need to run at which times) maintains a doubly-linked list of all the processes running at any time. This makes it easy to move a process from one queue (say, the list of active processes that need a turn to run) into another queue (say, the list of processes that are blocked and waiting for something to release them). The use of a doubly-linked list here allows each of these splices and rewires to run in time O(1) and without any memory allocations, and the doubly-linked-list structure works well for implementing the scheduler using queues (where you only need to pull things out from the front.)

Adding to templatetypedef's answer.

You consider following applications :

- A music player which has next and prev buttons.
- Represent a deck of cards in a game.
- The browser cache which allows you to hit the BACK-FORWARD pages.
- Applications that have a Most Recently Used list (a linked list of file names)
- Undo-Redo functionality

Any application where you want to traverse both side from specific point.