recursively delete all files except some especific types

Question

I want to recursively delete all files in some folders except those who have .gz extension. Normally I use

find /thepath -name "foo" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

to recursively delete all folders named "foo" in the /thepath. But now I wan to add an exclusion option. How that is possible?

For example, the folder structure looks like

 .hiddenfolder
 .hiddenfolder/bin.so
 arc.tar.gz
 note.txt
 sample

So I want to delete everything but keep arc.tar.gz

Answer 1

Find and delete all files under /thepath except with name matching *.gz:

# First check with ls -l
find /thepath -type f ! -name '*.gz' -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

# Ok: delete
find /thepath -type f ! -name '*.gz' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -vf

Oh, and to delete all empty left-over directories:

find /thepath -type d -empty -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir -v

Answer 2

I think

find /thepath -name "foo" ! -name "*.gz" -print0

should produce the correct list of filenames, but check before piping the output to your xargs command to perform the actual deletions.