Hmm. Okay, maybe I was being a bit rash when I said the short answer to "2." was "no" -- what I should have said was "yes, sort of, but you don't really get your desired result". At least, as I understand the OP, it would not be desirable to write a statement to the pipe handle after the downstream process has ended.

And based on my experiments (simple-minded, but functional, I think), there's no way around losing at least one print statement after the pipe process exits (because the previous statement caused that process to terminate on its own initiative).

Another thought -- not pretty, but... -- opening a pipe returns a pid, right? and maybe there's something that one could do within a loop, before printing to the pipe handle, to see if that pid is still running.