How to stop ls from descending into directories, similar to prune for find

(Your question is not clear: if a directory contains some.foo and some.bar, should it be deleted? I interpreted it as requiring such a directory to be kept.)

The following script should work, provided that no file name contains a newline and no directory matches *.foo. The principle is to traverse the directory from the leaves up (-depth), and as *.foo files are encountered, the containing directory and all parents are marked as protected. Any reached file that is not *.foo and not protected is a directory to be deleted. Because of the -depth traversal order, a directory is always reached after the *.foo files that might protect it. Warning: minimally tested, remove the echo at your own risk.

find . -depth -name '*.foo' -o -type d | awk '{
    if ($0 ~ /\.foo$/) {
        while (sub("/+[^/]+$", "")) {protect[$0]=1;}
    } else {
        if (!protect[$0]) {
            gsub("[\\\001-/]", "\\\\&"); # protect file names for xargs
            print;
        }
    }
}' | xargs echo rm -rf

_{For once, I'm not proposing a zsh solution.}

This sounds like a job for find.

• Use -maxdepth to only return the current directory, not recursivly search inside subfolders
• Use -type f to only return files and not directories or device nodes or whatever else
• Use a combination if -not and -name to avoid the files with names you don't want

It might come together like this:

find /path/to/uploads -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name 't_*'