I am trying to run gnuplot and send it some plotting commands from Mathematica. Unfortunately without any luck. For me the documentation is completely useless as it gives little to no practical examples. My attempts look like this:

RunThrough["gnuplot", "set term pngn set out "test.png"n test"] 

Now this produces no output in Mathematica and neither the test file is produced. So I tried

<< "!echo $ TERM" 

which is in documentation here. This again produces nothing and by nothing I mean absolutely no output:

Finally I tried RunProcess[“date”]

as in documentation and it returned: .

as expected however the very first execution took almost 10 seconds.

However, I would really like to use RunThrough and I have no idea why it is not doing at least what is described in the documentation. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? (MA 11.1.0 on Debian 9.2).