diff --git a/perl/Git.pm b/perl/Git.pm
index 650db90853c6ff..dc48159ccab1cf 100644
--- a/perl/Git.pm
+++ b/perl/Git.pm
@@ -1489,12 +1489,12 @@ sub _command_common_pipe {
 		if (not defined $pid) {
 			throw Error::Simple("open failed: $!");
 		} elsif ($pid == 0) {
-			if (defined $opts{STDERR}) {
-				close STDERR;
-			}
 			if ($opts{STDERR}) {
 				open (STDERR, '>&', $opts{STDERR})
 					or die "dup failed: $!";
+			} elsif (defined $opts{STDERR}) {
+				open (STDERR, '>', '/dev/null')
+					or die "opening /dev/null failed: $!";
 			}
 			_cmd_exec($self, $cmd, @args);
 		}
diff --git a/t/t9700/test.pl b/t/t9700/test.pl
index 0d4e366232c29b..1140767b50706f 100755
--- a/t/t9700/test.pl
+++ b/t/t9700/test.pl
@@ -45,7 +45,8 @@ BEGIN
 # Failure cases for config:
 # Save and restore STDERR; we will probably extract this into a
 # "dies_ok" method and possibly move the STDERR handling to Git.pm.
-open our $tmpstderr, ">&STDERR" or die "cannot save STDERR"; close STDERR;
+open our $tmpstderr, ">&STDERR" or die "cannot save STDERR";
+open STDERR, ">", "/dev/null" or die "cannot redirect STDERR to /dev/null";
 is($r->config("test.dupstring"), "value2", "config: multivar");
 eval { $r->config_bool("test.boolother") };
 ok($@, "config_bool: non-boolean values fail");