Timing GPG's Encryption

Question

As part of a college assignment, I must time how long it takes GPG to encrypt a large file. However, I'm not sure how to go about it. A stop watch wouldn't be very accurate!

Thanks.

P.S. By helping me, you're not "spoiling" the integrity of the assignment.

Answer 1

Assuming you're running a unix-like system (Linux, *BSD, OSX, Windows+Cygwin, Windows+msys, etc.):

time gpg -e /path/to/large/file

The “user” time is the time spent on the encryption, plus a negligible amount for parsing the configuration file and so on. The “system” time is mostly the time spent on I/O (probably negligible).