If you have a Maven project with a bunch of dependencies, and you've written a harness to launch your thing, it's handy to be able to create a shell script to run your harness with all your dependencies on the classpath.  The Maven assembler plugin is what you need.

In your pom:

<build>
 <plugins>
   ... 
   <plugin>
   <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
   <artifactId>appassembler-maven-plugin</artifactId>
   <configuration>
      <programs>
        <program>
           <mainClass>com.example.yourApp.YourClassWithMainMethod</mainClass>
           <name>my_cool_app</name>
        </program>
      </programs>
    </configuration>
   </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

Then run:

$ mvn package appassembler:assemble

This produces a shell (and .bat) script in target/appassembler:

$ sh target/bin/my_cool_app
Hello world!

This is one of those "I keep forgetting how to do this so I'd better blog it so I can find it later" kind of posts: It's not original, but handy, and I keep forgetting to run the package part of the Maven command.