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 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.