I've been experimenting off and on with building a mod within Oblivion that is capable of playing chess. The idea comes from a Battle Chess mod that was a WIP back in April but has since been discontinued.

To make the mod work, I need to be able to communicate with an external EXE application - by issuing command line text to it, and receiving its command line responses.
I have not seen any documentation on commands in the CS, or added by OBSE etc., that would allow such a thing. Is anyone aware of any way to do this?

Pretty sure direct communication is impossible - well in theory you could build an OBSE plugin made to communicate with it.

One possibility is through text files. The external application writes to a specific text file that your mod continiously reads, and vice versa.

That's honestly a pretty good suggestion. The OBSE plugin suggestion was made on another forum as well, so that's likely what I'll look at first, but this could work too.

If anyone wishes to assist (or for that matter, write the interface), let me know. I can do some programming and scripting but I'm WAY outside of my current understanding here Even pointing me to documentation on how to write an OBSE plugin would be useful.

Yep, it looks like a combination of reading/writing to a text file, and using Pluggy, is my best bet. Thanks for the suggestion!
Any help on bringing this idea to life (a viable chess game within Oblivion) would be GREATLY appreciated! Please PM me or respond here if interested.