Setting Compiler Directives in a Directives File

Using a directives file with one or more projects

You can use a text file, external to your project, to pass Compile directives during the build process.

This can be especially helpful when you need to compile multiple projects with the same directives as you only need to configure the projects to use the directives file:

Place the directives that you want to apply to all your project in a single text file, directivesfile, on your file system.
Then, configure the project's properties of each project that you need to compile with these directives as follows:
- In the project's properties, click Micro Focus > Project Settings > COBOL.
- Specify the following in the Additional directives field:
```
USE"path\directivesfile"
```
  where path can be relative to the project.

Overriding the default product behavior

CAUTION:

The following affects all compilation done on the system and using or editing a system-wide directives file can result in unexpected behavior.

Place the directive that you want to override in the system-wide directives file, cobol.dir. Make sure that the file is in folder in a directory specified by the COBDIR environment variable. By default cobol.dir is in the $COBDIR\etc folder.