Piping input into an engine

[Ras]

I could make it so that the engine sees the EOF and not react to it until the last command has been completely executed

Which would be a long time in case of "go infinite" and a GUI crash.

Even though I'm a long-time Linux user myself (and recently fully switched to it on the desktop, finally) who uses the command line extensively, I can't see myself using a chess engine like that.

Chess engines are not meant as CLI tools on their own in the first place. They are modular components of a framework with the engine as backend and a controller as frontend, either a GUI or e.g. a CLI tournament manager. The main difference to actual CLI tools is that stdin/stdout is a two-sided communication protocol, not the input/processing/output model of usual CLI tools. Also, a UCI engine may discard commands other than stop, quit, or isready while searching, which means that you couldn't reliably batch up more than one go command anyway.

[gflohr]

I also wouldn't use an engine inside a terminal for playing chess. But while developing I do it all the time, with my own one and others.

And "my batch mode" is also useful for scripting because you can simply prepare a file with commands instead setting up bi-directional IPC.

[hgm]

When I run an engine from the terminal for debugging, I just copy-paste the set of required commands into the terminal.