This is a bug that appears to be caused by calling set-process-thread on some process, allowing that process to finish and be cleaned up, and then trying to wait on some other process called at a later point. While the issue appears when calling url-copy-file, I suspect that other functions that create a process and then wait for the result are affected, but I have not identified any at this point in time. I have attached process-thread-bugs.el that was also included in https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=56487 which includes the repro for this issue. The two functions of interest are enable-hang and maybe-trigger-hang. Assuming process-thread-bugs.el is in the top level of the emacs repo run the following commands to see the behavior in action src/emacs -Q -batch -l ./process-thread-bugs.el wont hang 1 src/emacs -Q -batch -l ./process-thread-bugs.el will hang 1 src/emacs -Q -batch -l ./process-thread-bugs.el will hang 2 When calling will hang 1 or will hang 2, the behavior should be obvious as a presumably infinite number of lines of "oh no" being printed to stderr.