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Of course, if any of your commands prompt for input, you'll be disappointed that's not always as easy as it appears on the surface.

Does anyone have a better way to do this kind of thing?

The standard is expect [1]. There are also libraries for many programming languages which perform a similar task, such as pexpect [2].

The better solution is to change the command so it expects programatic arguments / pass command line parameters.

i.e.

prefer `apt-get install -y` over `yes | apt-get install foo`