How to find the parent of a Maven transitive dependency

I am building a Java (web) application with Maven and Eclipse.

When I look inside my .war file I can see the following logging libraries there:

log4j-1.2.14.jar
log4j-1.2.17.jar
slf4j-api-1.7.5.jar
slf4j-log4j12-1.7.5.jar

I did not declared these libraries in my pom.xml, so they probably are transitive dependencies (i.e. dependencies of my dependencies).

How can I find out which of my dependencies depend on these libraries?

I tried to use the mvn dependency:tree plugin, but it does not show any of these .jars.

In Eclipse, the Java Resources > Libraries > Maven Dependencies node does not show them either. Though, curiously, it shows other transitive dependencies of my project.

Solution

If you want to rely on maven only you may want to take a closer look on the dependency plugin, here are two examples:

mvn dependency:tree -Dverbose will display more detailed information - especially for example if a artifact will be omitted for conflicting with another artifacts version (e.g. convergence issue). It will also display you the hirachy with all the transitive dependencies.

To have a specific artefact analyzed (to for example find who delivers a specific transitive dependency) you can specify like so:

mvn dependency:tree -Dincludes=com.my.group.id:my-artefact-id:jar:1.0.1 -Dverbose

(Where you obviously need to adjust the artefact, packaging type and version according to your needs)