If I understand your problem correctly, you just want to display one of a number of messages based on the current time, then quit.

UPDATE: As noted by Ikegami below, this is wrong!
"So take the current time in seconds; mod it by the total number of seconds in a message cycle, and divide the results by the number of messages you have:"

The correct formula (Thanks to Ikegami again) is (time / message-display-time) mod number-of-messages. 

# See correct version of this by ikegami below!
@message = ("Message 1",
            "Message 2",
            "Message 3",
            "Message 4",
            "Message 5",
            "Message 6",
            "Message 7",
            "Message 8",
            "Message 9",
            "Message 10");

$num_msgs = @message;
$msg_time = 5;
$total_time = $num_msgs * $msg_time;

$msg_num = int((time() % $total_time) / $num_msgs);

print $message[$msg_num], "\n";

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In reply to Re: display stuff based on systemclock by ramlight
in thread display stuff based on systemclock by Wire64

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