I have a process that does a lot of things I won't go into, but on a
particular machine we have the process looks like it is ending
according to the logs I have but is still running according to ps. Even
a kill -9 does not remove it.

It shows up in []s, i.e. [processname]. I do not know what the [] means
around a process name as I have never seen that before.

I know my process makes it to my exit list as I log to a file that this
occurred. Is my process hung out in some system call? How do I tell? I
cannot attach the dbx debugger to it as it hangs as well.

Any help or clues would be appreciated. Thanks.

The ps output is:

root 40012 1 63 10:13:30 pts/0 89:18 [hinit]

Part of your question is answered here:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aix-faq/part1/section-42.html

The other part is answered here:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...ixcmds4/ps.htm

Thanks for the answers sbzx, but the first one does not work since
crash does not exist on our systems, AIX 5.3, and dbx hangs trying to
attach to the process.

I already knew how to use ps and display flags/status about the
process. I am not sure what you wanted me to look at since there is
nothing that explains the [] in the text.

Turns out, one of the child processes called APIs in a library that was
downlevel and didn't match. This made the child process go away but
didn't clean something up so the parent process hung out forever when
it called to exit. Replacing the library with the current version fixed
the problem.

This sounds like an AIX bug to me.

Also, this was found out by a member of our team that used the kernel
debugger to go in and see what was happening.