Launch a subprocess in a pseudo terminal (pty), and interact with both the process and its pty. Sometimes, piping stdin and stdout is not enough. There might be a password prompt that doesn't read from stdin, output that changes when it's going to a pipe rather than a terminal, or curses-style interfaces that rely on a terminal. If you need to automate these things, running the process in a pseudo terminal (pty) is the answer. WWW: https://github.com/pexpect/ptyprocess