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 png\n 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](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/ExternalPrograms.html). This again produces nothing and by nothing I mean absolutely no output:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C8Abq.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C8Abq.png)

Finally I tried 

```
RunProcess["date"]

```

as in [documentation](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/RunProcess.html) and it returned:
[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fwokI.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fwokI.png).

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).