### 3.7 Options to Control Diagnostic Messages Formatting

Traditionally, diagnostic messages have been formatted irrespective of the output device's aspect (e.g. its width, ...). The options described below can be used to control the diagnostic messages formatting algorithm, e.g. how many characters per line, how often source location information should be reported. Right now, only the C++ front end can honor these options. However it is expected, in the near future, that the remaining front ends would be able to digest them correctly.

`-fmessage-length=` n
  Try to format error messages so that they fit on lines of about n characters. The default is 72 characters for `g++` and 0 for the rest of the front ends supported by GCC. If n is zero, then no line-wrapping will be done; each error message will appear on a single line.

`-fdiagnostics-show-location=once`
  Only meaningful in line-wrapping mode. Instructs the diagnostic messages reporter to emit once source location information; that is, in case the message is too long to fit on a single physical line and has to be wrapped, the source location won't be emitted (as prefix) again, over and over, in subsequent continuation lines. This is the default behavior.
`-fdiagnostics-show-location=every-line`
  Only meaningful in line-wrapping mode. Instructs the diagnostic messages reporter to emit the same source location information (as prefix) for physical lines that result from the process of breaking a message which is too long to fit on a single line.
`-fdiagnostics-show-options`
  This option instructs the diagnostic machinery to add text to each diagnostic emitted, which indicates which command line option directly controls that diagnostic, when such an option is known to the diagnostic machinery.