Sounds like you want Term::ReadLine (or one of its CPAN submodules) at least for the part where you present a prompt to the user.

How to send input to your slave programs is a completely separate issue. That might be as simply as piping a stream into them or as hard as needing pseudoterminals and select on all the I/O streams.

Also notice that you don't have to be root to install modules. You can have a private module repository anywhere you can store files.