Causes cob processing to terminate after the COBOL Compiler err-level has been exceeded. By default, the cob command terminates if your code contains reported errors in the category severe or above.
err-level is a single alphabetic character representing the possible levels of error:
The cob process (not the compile process) is terminated if your code contains an error at the specified level or higher, provided such errors are reported to the cob command by the Compiler. This depends on the setting of the WARNING Compiler directive, which controls the level of error reported by the Compiler.
Thus, for example, if you set the WARNING directive to force the Compiler to report only unrecoverable, severe and error level errors, but also set the -W flag to abort the cob command if any errors at the information level (or above) are reported, errors only in the categories unrecoverable, severe or error actually causes the cob command to terminate, as warning and information errors are not reported.