How to kill a process on Mac OS X that's “trying to exit” (E)?

Question

On Mac OS X 10.6 I sometimes get processes that show up in "ps" as "E", which the man page says means they're "trying to exit", but they won't. "kill -9" doesn't work, neither does waiting. Is there any way to get rid of them? I usually wouldn't care, but they sometimes block an entry in the Dock.

Answer 1

Do you get an error when trying to kill? What if you specify the PID, like kill 12345?

Also, you can try a killall, like this: killall program but keep in mind it will kill anything that matches, so be a little specific with the program name, dont just put killall fi or something that may match more than one program, otherwise you may have unexpected results.