Perl offers you the means to do it:
chomp ($input = <>); to catch User input.
print STDOUT $output; to print output. (Leave out the "STDOUT" if you like)
print STDERR $output; to print errors.

You may use open() to create filehandles on a pipe to or from your other process and print to it or read from it. You can also use open() to access STDERR or even STDOUT to read from. You might select a filehandle just for lazyness' sake. Perl enables you to it the hard way a little less awkward than I could imagine. You will learn a lot.
Or you could just save your time with some CPAN module.