I have bad news for you. Do you know what (n)curses is for? Its basically a library for those magic strings (and ascii control characters) that run extra routines in the terminal. And every terminal has these routines.
As I see it, the parent is specifically worried about the terminal needing to monitor input and fork a process in response. Control character handling should be pretty robust (or worst-case, a NOP). Curses-based programs read/write specific control characters to move the cursor, etc (really any tty should support control characters).
But they don’t fork a new process… (unless I’m very mistaken).
See xterm manpage, "printerCommand" or urxvt manpage, "print-pipe". They may be triggered remotely by the media copy commands. Good news is, this is supposed to be disabled per default.
But they don’t fork a new process… (unless I’m very mistaken).