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... why?

A pact, from Latin pactum ("something agreed upon"), is a formal agreement.

The OP is not upset about the name alone, but against the twinge of realization that dawns after reading the accompanying description.

I'm not exactly sure it's possible to describe killing processes much differently.. I mean the Linux command to kill a process is 'kill'..

the kill command just sends the signal of the user's choice, not necessarily SIGTERM (the default) or SIGKILL or whatever.

This lets you change behavior in a running process from the shell by triggering a desired handled signal.

Hopefully they never come across parents reaping children....