How to instruct GCC to stop after 5 errors?

I would welcome such an option as well. For now, I'm using the following workaround to get the first five errors:

<make> 2>&1|grep error|head -5

The command-line option -fmax-errors=N directs the compiler to give up after N errors. This option is present in GCC 4.6 and later.

The command-line option -Wfatal-errors directs the compiler to give up after one error. This option is present in GCC 4.0 and later.

In both cases, warnings do not count toward the limit unless you also specify -Werror.

You can use gcc option:

-fmax-errors=5

for this purpose.

I have to ask why you would want to do this. Sometimes the error that exists in the code is not the first or even found in the first five errors. Sometimes it's beyond that and only is recognizable once you scroll down the list. A better method might be to break up your code and place it into smaller libraries if you're bothered by compile times. Or if you're concerned with things scrolling off the screen of a command line, using the '>>' operator to pipe the messages into a file.