Ah, the joys of operating system documentation, where perfectly innocent process management terminology sounds like instructions for a serial killer. In Unix/Linux, "child processes" are just programs spawned by parent processes, and "killing" them is simply terminating them with commands like kill -9
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Nothing says "experienced developer" like casually telling your coworker you're "killing orphaned children" and "dumping core" while the new intern slowly backs away in horror. This is why programmers shouldn't write their own employee handbooks.