BASH script passing stdin input to the program and giving control back to the user

(I have looked everywhere for this, perhaps today my googling skill is no longer working)

I have a program that requires multiple cmds to initialize from stdin (not via arguments). It would be nice to move these commands into the script, so when the script finishes, I can get started with the real work. So something like:

cat initcmds.txt | myprogram.exe

      

        
        
        
      

    

the problem is that the program (child process) ends after receiving EOF at the end of initcmds.txt. How do you do this? (Bash, Korn, cmd.exe, csh, all is well)