I would like to know which dependency described in my pom.xml brings a transitive dependency in my target directory.
To be more precise, I have the library "poi-2.5.1-final-20040804.jar" in my WEB-INF/lib directory and I would like to know which dependency in my pom.xml brings that.
You can have many reports by
One of them is the dependency report.
If you use eclipse and the m2eclipse plugin (http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org) then there is a graphical version of dependency tree where you can filter by scope etc.
To add to @David Crow, here's a dependency:tree example from the Maven site:
might output
The dependency information is also included in the Project Information/Dependencies report if you have maven generate a site for the project, using mvn site.
Using the Maven Dependency Plugin:
If you run maven with "-x" switch, it will print out plenty of diagnostics, I guess the relevant dependency path can be picked up from there.