I am working on a big projects with many pom.xml files and I need to specify all the libraries that I use. This means that I need to read pom.xml files recursively and get groupId, artifactId, scope and version. I checked out mvn dependency:tree but I can't find a way to print it to a file in a readable format. I saw appendOutput but I saw no example on how to use it in cmd. I saw some solutions done in Linux but I only have access to Windows XP.
This can (at least now) be done with command line options to the dependency:tree plugin.
Try:
mvn dependency:tree -Doutput=/path/to/file
Reference: Maven Dependency Plugin Page
You only asked about "readable" format, but you can also pass the -DoutputType parameter with various options. Also note that the version I have installed, I get the following warning:
[WARNING] The parameter output is deprecated. Use outputFile instead.
So, consider trying it with -DoutputFile=/path/to/file
Also, I was unable to get the -DoutputType paramater to give me anything other than the default text, but didn't have a chance to play around with it. YMMV.