I'm not terribly new to Perl, I know how to capture output from programs and such, but I'm planning a project where I want to have a Perl script act as an interface to another program. I was wondering, what would the best approach be for sending input to this program, and getting its output? I'd like to do it with the program simply being run by the script, and left running (and be able to interact with it) for as long as the script is.

Basically I want to be able have the script run the program, take data from the user, send appropriate input to the program, get the output, and present it to the user. Any suggestions on how to tackle this are welcome. :-)