Computing path to maven module base directory

Having spent a bunch of time writing functional tests for maven projects with many modules, I tend to end up needing access to the project base path (typically the path with the pom.xml file in it).  This isn't much of a problem when running a single module - new File(".") pretty much does it.  On the other hand when attempting to access modules outside of the jvm base path, things start to get tricky.

There's a couple ways to skin this cat - probably one of the more portable ones is a utility method that accepts a Class and a path and returns a File by checking the supplied Class' classloader:

        public static File getPathInModule(Class<?> classInModule,String ... items){
                String tcPath = classInModule.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().getFile();
                String[] tcPathParts = StringUtils.split(tcPath,File.separator);
                StringBuffer pomPath = new StringBuffer();
                for(String part:tcPathParts){
                        pomPath.append(File.separator);
                        if("target".equals(part)){
                                break;
                        }
                        pomPath.append(part);
                }
                pomPath.append(StringUtils.join(items,File.separator));
                return new File(pomPath.toString());
        }

This works fairly well as long as there is a target directory present, which is for my purposes - always. It could be modified to look for a pom.xml file instead though.