subprocess readline hangs waiting for EOF

As @Ron Reiter pointed out, you can’t use readline() because cout doesn’t print newlines implicitly — you either need std::endl or "\n" here.

For an interactive use, when you can’t change the child program, pexpect module provides several convenience methods (and in general it solves for free: input/output directly from/to terminal (outside of stdin/stdout) and block-buffering issues):

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

if sys.version_info[:1] < (3,):
    from pexpect import spawn, EOF # $ pip install pexpect
else:
    from pexpect import spawnu as spawn, EOF # Python 3

child = spawn("./randomNumber") # run command
child.delaybeforesend = 0 
child.logfile_read = sys.stdout # print child output to stdout for debugging
child.expect("enter a number: ") # read the first prompt
lo, hi = 0, 100
while lo <= hi:
    mid = (lo + hi) // 2
    child.sendline(str(mid)) # send number
    index = child.expect([": ", EOF]) # read prompt
    if index == 0: # got prompt
        prompt = child.before
        if "too high" in prompt:
            hi = mid - 1 # guess > num
        elif "too low" in prompt:
            lo = mid + 1 # guess < num
    elif index == 1: # EOF
        assert "Congratulations" in child.before
        child.close()
        break
else:
    print('not found')
    child.terminate()
sys.exit(-child.signalstatus if child.signalstatus else child.exitstatus)

It works but it is a binary search therefore (traditionally) there could be bugs.

Here’s a similar code that uses subprocess module for comparison:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import print_function
import sys
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

p = Popen("./randomNumber", stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE,
          bufsize=1, # line-buffering
          universal_newlines=True) # enable text mode
p.stdout.readline() # discard welcome message: "This program gener...

readchar = lambda: p.stdout.read(1)
def read_until(char):
    buf = []
    for c in iter(readchar, char):
        if not c: # EOF
            break
        buf.append(c)
    else: # no EOF
        buf.append(char)
    return ''.join(buf).strip()

prompt = read_until(':') # read 1st prompt
lo, hi = 0, 100
while lo <= hi:
    mid = (lo + hi) // 2
    print(prompt, mid)
    print(mid, file=p.stdin) # send number
    prompt = read_until(':') # read prompt
    if "Congratulations" in prompt:
        print(prompt)
        print(mid)
        break # found
    elif "too high" in prompt:
        hi = mid - 1 # guess > num
    elif "too low" in prompt:
        lo = mid + 1 # guess < num
else:
    print('not found')
    p.kill()
for pipe in [p.stdin, p.stdout]:
    try:
        pipe.close()
    except OSError:
        pass
sys.exit(p.wait())