Passing arguments to an interactive program non-interactively

For more complex tasks there is expect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect ). It basically simulates a user, you can code a script how to react to specific program outputs and related stuff.

This also works in cases like ssh that prohibits piping passwords to it.

Many ways

pipe your input

echo "yes
no
maybe" | your_program

redirect from a file

your_program < answers.txt

use a here document (this can be very readable)

your_program << ANSWERS
yes
no
maybe
ANSWERS

use a here string

your_program <<< $'yes\nno\nmaybe\n'