Hi Jonathan,

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Were you been able to reproduce that outside the script?

No, I was blind to the invocation.  You found it.  I was looking
without seeing.  Thank you.

Given that shells without functions can be considered sufficiently
obsolete to not be a consideration, perhaps a better solution is
to put the I-don't-care-about-error-messages code into a separate
function with stderr redirected.  Doing that turned out messier
than I had hoped....