how to remove dead process in the "exiting" state

[Dean Strik]

Matej Ondrusek wrote:
> It occured me more times that the process I have tried to remove using
> "kill -9" ended in the dead state when ps was showing "IE" status and I
> could do nothing with it except rebooting. Do you have any idea, how is it
> possible that some process comes to such a strange state ? Do you have any
> suggestion how to remove such a process without rebooting ? I'm using
> FreeBSD 4.8.

Not really an answer, but something you could try: a few weeks ago I
noticed that an XFree86 process in IE after a kill -9 on it could be
terminated by sending an additional kill -1 to it. Probably too specific
for this program though (and it was on 5.0-CURRENT actually).

-- 
Dean C. Strik             Eindhoven University of Technology
dean at stack.nl  |  dean at ipnet6.org  |  http://www.ipnet6.org/
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli