You can do this from perl. The main "problem" will be how interactive the program is. If you only want to pass input to the program and don't care about it's output, you can use standard open(): 
open CMD,"|/some/command >/dev/null" or die "Can't fork command: $!";
# ...
print CMD "line of input\n";
# ...
close CMD;

[download]
If you need both to control both input and output, there's IPC::Open2 and IPC::Open3, but those require you to be very careful about deadlocks.

Some people like the Expect module. Never used it myself, though.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re: interacting with background shell by Joost
in thread interacting with background shell by GuidoFubini

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