You could write a subroutine to put before and after the loop. Before the loop, you could have it return the time, and after the loop feed it that time and return the difference. That's the only way I can think of.

From the Benchmark docs for the new method:

         use Benchmark;
         $t0 = new Benchmark;
         # ... your code here ...
         $t1 = new Benchmark;
         $td = timediff($t1, $t0);
         print "the code took:",timestr($td),"\n";
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Update: A cheap example to help qball with his questions:

use strict;
use Benchmark;

print "Starting...";
my $t0 = new Benchmark;

# ... your code here ...
sleep(3);

my $t1 = new Benchmark;
my $td = timediff($t1, $t0);

print 'the code took:',timestr($td),"\n";
my $sec = timestr($td)+0;
print "that's ",timestr($td)+0," seconds\n";
my $min = int($sec/60);
$sec = $sec - $min*60;
printf ("also known as %d:%02d", $min, $sec);
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