gpg-agent timeout

[ael]

I wanted to use a long passphrase for some local symmetric encryption
but gpg-agent kept timing out before I could fully enter the fullphrase.

I looked at the man page and it was not clear to me whether
--pinentry-timeout
was relevant. And "A Pinentry may or may not honor this request." was
not promising.

In the event I used a shorter passphrase, but I would like higher
security.


My use case was to encrypt a fair number of files with the same
passphrase, but --multifile did not work with --symmetric.

In the event, afer taking the machine off line, I copied the passphrase to
the clipboard and pasted it into gpg-agent (which also has a rather
small window). Perhaps I could have written a short script somehow.

But I felt that gpg-agent was working against at every turn, and forcing
me into insecure practices.

Although I have been using gpg for a long time, although rarely and only
for the usual email case, I am still a novice.

What am I missing?

ael