Right now all of our console routines write to stdout or stderr and read from stdin.
This is fine in most cases, but there are times when we will want to force a write to the controlling tty (unix) or to the console window (windoze) and read from there instead of stdin.
An example would be like prompting for a password while taking part of a pipe (e.g. "echo SQLscript.sql | mysql -u user -p" or "echo datafile | ssh user@host sh -c 'cat > copyofdatafile'")