function expandFiles(directoriesPatternsOrFiles)

I'm working on a CLI in Node. What the CLI does it that it takes one set of .json files, compute some stuff, and spits out a different set of .json files. But what it does is not important. I wanted the CLI to feel flexible and powerful but also quite forgiving. And if you typo something, it should bubble up an error rather than redirecting it to something like console.error("not a valid file!").

Basically, you use it like this:

node index.js /some/directory
# or
node index.js /some/directory /some/other/directory
# or 
node index.js /some/directory/specificfile.json
# or
node index.js /some/directory/specificfile.json /some/directory/otherfile.json
# or
node index.js "/some/directory/*.json"
# or 
node index.js "/some/directory/**/*.json"

(Note that when typing patterns in the shell you have quote them, otherwise the shell will do the expansion for you)

Or, any combination of all of these:

node index.js "/some/directory/**/*.json" /other/directory /some/specific/file.json 

Whatever you use, with patterns, in particular, it has to make the final list of found files distinct and ordered by the order of the initial arguments.

Here's what I came up with:

import fs from "fs";
import path from "path";
// https://www.npmjs.com/package/glob
import glob from "glob";


/** Given an array of "things" return all distinct .json files.
 *
 * Note that these "things" can be a directory, a file path, or a
 * pattern.
 * Only if each thing is a directory do we search for *.json files
 * in there recursively.
 */
function expandFiles(directoriesPatternsOrFiles) {
  function findFiles(directory) {
    const found = glob.sync(path.join(directory, "*.json"));

    fs.readdirSync(directory, { withFileTypes: true })
      .filter(dirent => dirent.isDirectory())
      .map(dirent => path.join(directory, dirent.name))
      .map(findFiles)
      .forEach(files => found.push(...files));

    return found;
  }

  const filePaths = [];
  directoriesPatternsOrFiles.forEach(thing => {
    let files = [];
    if (thing.includes("*")) {
      // It's a pattern!
      files = glob.sync(thing);
    } else {
      const lstat = fs.lstatSync(thing);
      if (lstat.isDirectory()) {
        files = findFiles(thing);
      } else if (lstat.isFile()) {
        files = [thing];
      } else {
        throw new Error(`${thing} is neither file nor directory`);
      }
    }
    files.forEach(p => filePaths.includes(p) || filePaths.push(p));
  });
  return filePaths;
}

This is where I'm bracing myself for comments that either point out something obvious that Node experts know or some awesome npm package that already does this but better.

If you have a typo, you get an error thrown that looks something like this:

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, lstat 'mydirectorrry'

(assuming mydirectory exists but mydirectorrry is a typo)