I just wind up hammering ctrl-c till the prompt comes back (sometimes whilst muttering obscenities just slightly too audibly for an open plan office).

But what if you wanted to kill just the child and keep the parent running?

From the perspective of the end user, this distinction doesn't make much sense. If I run a command, and then hit ctrl-c, then I want it to kill the command I ran. I just don't care how that command was implemented: whether it was implemented with a single process or a whole tree of them.

(I might appreciate special handling of ctrl-c if the command I ran provides some sort of interactive environment (eg a command line text editor). That would probably need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.)

Many annoying things. Even the weather is abysmal today. Grr.

This post was brought to you by the adjectives "grumpy" and "wet".