Longturn because civilization should be free, and long :)

I cannot find any parts of it in any IM archive, so I guess it suffered on some format. But the idea was as follows.
It was bash script that used tail same way your did ( I think ; edrim took that tail part from you ). I had numerous tries to write it here, but only "graphical" way is clear enough.

1- End of turn as result of previous iteration of the script
2- sleep for 82800
3- setting variable x as random number from 1 to 7200
4- sleep for x
5- passing "/set timeout 82800" with tail into console resulting in instant end of turn as it lasts 82800+x at the very moment
7- sleep for at least 15-20 sec - believe me, it is needed, as end of turn calculations take some time and we do not interfere with server working with next operation, we experienced messy results ourselves without it
8- "/set timeout 90000" into console
9- goto 2

the idea was modified later by dividing line 2 into multiple sleeps broken by sc, but I am sure you can work something out.
What I had in mind, is that if we are able to force the turn to end, we can just drop all timeouts and make it fixed with value 90000. Every turn happens somewhen after 23h and before 90000sec=25h, and noone knows the value ( long values of x tend to make players mroe frustrated... but hell, noone ever knew after 23rd hour passed, what to expect.
So, it might look like this

2 as before
3 -||-
4 -||-
5-forcing turn to end instantly
6-goto 2