Force termination of child process from parent in fork() in C

Question:

Is it possible to terminate a child process without waiting for it to finish using the wait() function? For example, how to terminate the following child process:

pid_t pid;
switch(pid=fork()) {
case 0:
  for(;;){}
default:
  //здесь код, который завершает дочерний процесс
  return 0;

PS If you know some adequate, not very tricky material on fork() , where you can get theoretical knowledge, then direct me, please.

Answer:

Cruel method:

kill(pid, SIGKILL);

Or more gently:

kill(pid, SIGTERM);

In the first case, the child process will simply be killed; in the second case, it will receive a signal that it can process. But SIGKILL is guaranteed to kill the process, and in the case of SIGTERM , the process may refuse to terminate.

In the above code, since the process does not seem to contain any signal handlers, either method can be used, since, as @avp rightly pointed out to my mistake, SIGTERM will also kill the process if no signal handler is present.