It is currently not possible to have more than one -P on the same command line. Only the first specified profile is considered. So if you do mvn -Pmain -Ptest only the main profile will be taken into account. This may sound enough but it's not when your maven call is wrapped into a batch file. Let's say you have a batch doing the compilation of a given module: a.bat ------------------------------------- mvn install -Pmymodule %* ------------------------------------- and you want to pass a special integration tests profile you would do: a.bat -Pintegration-tests But that won't work since you are not allowed to have two -P. To merge them in DOS shell is quite a pain in the ***....