Yah I did see some reference to using 'expect' during my browsing.  If that is the solution that seems to work then I'll look into that and see if I can figure out what I'd need to do and update this post.

I believe I have what I need now via 'expect'.

I was assisted by this post http://mohamedelazab.blogspot.ca/2013/07/nice-notes-for-automating-cloning-11i.html

And for anybody else who stumbles on this thread here is what I run now.

When it comes to the adcfgclone step in my bash script I have:

/usr/bin/expect adcfgclone.exp  >$LOG_FILE_HOME/adcfgclone.log

Where the contents of the file are:

================================================================================

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

#

set force_conservative 0  ;# set to 1 to force conservative mode even if

                          ;# script wasn't run conservatively originally

if {$force_conservative} {

        set send_slow {1 .1}

        proc send {ignore arg} {

                sleep .1

                exp_send -s -- $arg

        }

}

set timeout -1

spawn perl adcfgclone.pl appsTier /app/oracle/ebsxxx/inst/apps/EBSXXX_yyy/appl/admin/EBSXXX_yyy.xml

match_max 100000

expect -exact "\r

Enter the APPS password : "

send -- "myappspwd\r"

expect -exact "\r

Do you want to startup the Application Services for EBSXXX? (y/n) \[y\] : "

send -- "n\r"

expect eof

==================================================================================

Then I run adautocfg and finally adstrtal.

I hope this post is not premature as I have yet to tun the whole thing together and via cron but on the cmd line works.