exec-maven-plugin says cannot run specified program, even though it is on the PATH

Question

Edit 20140716:

Solution found

tl;dr = exec-maven-plugin does not recognise .cmd files, but only .bat file

Answer 1

I had the same issue with 1.5.0 of the plugin.

The cause in my case was spaces in my user name resulting in a grunt path: C:\Users\My name with spaces\AppData\Roaming\npm.

When I moved the contents of the npm directory to a path without spaces, it worked.