can <exiting> processes on 4.2bsd be killed?

[dave at uwvax.ARPA]

Remember, <exiting> processes are in the zombie state -- they died, but their
parent has decided to ignore them (if an <exiting> process's parent is 
process 1, you have a problem).  I see these all the time.  The culprit? 
comsat (that thing that tells you have mail when you do 'biff y').  I do
wish comsat would let its children die.  If the hanging processes are not
comsat's children, you may have to look at messed up hardware (most commonly
tty stuff -- disk problems can also leave <exiting> processes around).

Dave Cohrs @ wisconsin
-- 

Dave Cohrs
...!{allegra,heurikon,ihnp4,seismo,uwm-evax}!dave
dave at wisc-rsch.arpa