abort (thing)

A libc function prototyped in stdlib.h that does something like:

signal( SIGABRT, SIG_DFL );
kill( getpid(), SIGABRT );

This gives the process an abort signal using the default handler, thus stopping the program and possbily dumping core. Note that any child processes created with, say, fork, will not be aborted. To do that, you'd do:

kill( 0, SIGABRT );

<joke humor="lame">
No, this is not generally considered murder by C programmers.
</joke>