AbstractJavadocMojo tries to be smart by seeing if the file indicated by javadocExecutable exists, but this is actually quite problematic. If you put the following in your config: <javadocExecutable>blahblahblah${file.separator}javadoc</javadocExecutable> then you'll get an error on Windows since the file is actually javadoc.exe, which is a pain since it's perfectly acceptable to omit the .exe when executing a command. If you put .exe in the config, then it won't work on non-Windows platforms since the files doesn't have .exe. Forcing users to add hackery to their POMs to add .exe in some cases and leave it off in others is onerous. Methinks it's much preferable to simply use the path provided by the config. If it doesn't exist, let CommandLineUtils.executeCommandLine (or something else) throw an exception.