The comments from Paul: I think we might be able to improve the output formatting for this subcommand in a similar manner to the other subcommands a while ago (i.e. avoiding long paths but with an option to go back to the full path format - see show-overlayed and its -f option for an example) however this can be done at a later date.
Merged into master: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=86ac3b53b5ea9d74edab975adad9c831055da0ed
no error when run "bitbake-layers show-cross-depends -f" with git master branch commit 7d22ef28e64de06b6238d0ef9b664c0bee6efa46.