<p>I am running both maven inside the m2eclipse plugin, windows command line and my cygwin command line.</p>

<p>cygwin's bash shell dumps artifacts into the cygwin /home/me/.m2 directory</p>

<p>but m2eclipse &amp; windows shell (on vista) uses /Users/me/Documents/.m2</p>

<p>Is it possible to tell the mvn command to use one central .m2 directory ?</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

Sure, several ways.  The most typical is to specify this in your settings.xml file:
http://maven.apache.org/settings.html
```
```
<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                      http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
  <localRepository>/my/secret/repository</localRepository>
</settings>
```
```