Difference between Eclipse's "clean project" and Maven's "mvn clean" in m2e

Question

I use M2e + Eclipse + Maven and I would like to know what the difference is between:

• running "mvn clean" in a terminal and
• running "clean project" from Eclipse?

Can anyone please advise?

Solution 1

From some quick tests, it seems that Eclipse's clean project is only clearing out the folders that are set as output folder in the project's preferences, whereas maven's clean is deleting the /target folder completely.

Solution 2

I have the following entry in my pom.xml file:

<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.4.1</version>
<configuration>
    <excludeDefaultDirectories>true</excludeDefaultDirectories>
    <filesets>
        <fileset>
            <directory>target</directory>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>classes/db/**</exclude>
            </excludes>
        </fileset>
    </filesets>
    <verbose>true</verbose>
</configuration>

When I do a mvn clean from the command line, the directory that I want kept (classes/db in the output directory) is not deleted, as I expect. However, when I do a Clean in Eclipse, the directory does get removed.