Broken auto retry on parallel mode

[BlackFuffey]

I did this

Call curl with
--retry 5 --retry-delay 2 --retry-all-errors

Curl first failed with 401, and then without waiting for retry-delay, immediately retried and got stuck forever at 200% progress(??) with the following output

DL% UL%  Dled  Uled  Xfers  Live Total     Current  Left    Speed
--  --      0     0     1     1                                 0      curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 401
Warning: Problem (retrying all errors). Will retry in 2 seconds. 5 retries left.
200 200   820   184     1     0           00:00:28              0 

I expected the following

Curl wait the correct amount of delay and retry normally

curl/libcurl version

curl 8.18.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/8.18.0 OpenSSL/3.6.1 zlib/1.3.1.zlib-ng brotli/1.2.0 zstd/1.5.7 libidn2/2.3.8 libpsl/0.21.5 libssh2/1.11.1 nghttp2/1.68.0 ngtcp2/1.20.0 nghttp3/1.15.0 mit-krb5/1.21.3
Release-Date: 2026-01-07
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps ipfs ipns mqtt pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp ws wss
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS brotli GSS-API HSTS HTTP2 HTTP3 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz NTLM PSL SPNEGO SSL threadsafe TLS-SRP UnixSockets zstd

operating system

Distro: Arch Linux
uname -a: Linux Metal-N-Magic 6.18.9-zen1-2-zen #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:45:06 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[bagder]

You seem to have left out details of your command line. The shown progress meter is for parallel transfers?

[BlackFuffey]

Here is the entire config:

retry = 5
retry-delay = 2
retry-all-errors
fail-with-body
show-error
parallel
parallel-max = 5
    

request             = POST
url                 = https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/speech
header              = "Authorization: Bearer <apikey>"
header              = "Content-Type: application/json"
data                = <data>
output              = "./outputs/speech-0.mp3"

This config is generated by a shell script, hence why parallel is here despite there being only one request.

[icing]

I made #21192 which reproduces the bug for a 502 response. But a 401 response (as in the report) seems to never be retried?

[icing]

I was able to write a test reproducing this and made a fix in #21206. If you can verify this on your system, we'd appreciate that. Thanks!