How do you disable the unused variable warnings coming out of gcc in 3rd party code I do not wish to edit?

The -Wno-unused-variable switch usually does the trick. However, that is a very useful warning indeed if you care about these things in your project. It becomes annoying when GCC starts to warn you about things not in your code though.

I would recommend you keeping the warning on, but use -isystem instead of -I for include directories of third-party projects. That flag tells GCC not to warn you about the stuff you have no control over.

For example, instead of -IC:\\boost_1_52_0, say -isystem C:\\boost_1_52_0.

Hope it helps. Good Luck!

Sometimes you just need to suppress only some warnings and you want to keep other warnings, just to be safe. In your code, you can suppress the warnings for variables and even formal parameters by using GCC's unused attribute. Lets say you have this code snippet:

void func(unsigned number, const int version)
{
  unsigned tmp;
  std::cout << number << std::endl;
}

There might be a situation, when you need to use this function as a handler - which (imho) is quite common in C++ Boost library. Then you need the second formal parameter version, so the function's signature is the same as the template the handler requires, otherwise the compilation would fail. But you don't really need it in the function itself either...

The solution how to mark variable or the formal parameter to be excluded from warnings is this:

void func(unsigned number, const int version __attribute__((unused)))
{
  unsigned tmp __attribute__((unused));
  std::cout << number << std::endl;
}

GCC has many other parameters, you can check them in the man pages. This also works for the C programs, not only C++, and I think it can be used in almost every function, not just handlers. Go ahead and try it! ;)

P.S.: Lately I used this to suppress warnings of Boosts' serialization in template like this:

template <typename Archive>
void serialize(Archive &ar, const unsigned int version __attribute__((unused)))

EDIT: Apparently, I didn't answer your question as you needed, drak0sha done it better. It's because I mainly followed the title of the question, my bad. Hopefully, this might help other people, who get here because of that title... :)

If you're using gcc and want to disable the warning for selected code, you can use the #pragma compiler directive:

#pragma GCC diagnostic push
#pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "-Wunused-variable"
( your problematic library includes )
#pragma GCC diagnostic pop

For code you control, you may also use __attribute__((unused)) to instruct the compiler that specific variables are not used.