Communicate multiple times with a process without breaking the pipe?

I think you misunderstand communicate...

http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.communicate

communicate sends a string to the other process and then waits on it to finish... (Like you said waits for the EOF listening to the stdout & stderror)

What you should do instead is:

proc.stdin.write('message')

# ...figure out how long or why you need to wait...

proc.stdin.write('message2')

(and if you need to get the stdout or stderr you'd use proc.stdout or proc.stderr)

I've had this problem before, and as far as I could ever figure, you couldn't do this with subprocess (which, I agree, is very counterintuitive if true). I ended up using pexpect (obtainable from PyPI).

You can use:

proc.stdin.write('input')    
if proc.stdout.closed:
    print(proc.stdout)