Remove-Item with Recurse and Exclude multiple subdirectories - powershell

Question

I am trying to create a script to delete all files and directories within a folder, except for specified folders and their content.
Example tree:
test/
- images/
- folder_to_keep/
- misc/
- blah/
- some_other_folder/
- another_to_keep/
- snafu/
I've searched for this specific question with little luck. I've tried:
Remove-Item .\test\* -Exclude (".\test\images\folder_to_keep", ".\test\some_other_folder\another_to_keep") -Recurse
but that still deletes everything.
FYI, I am trying to run this script in a build job on an Atlassian Bamboo server if that helps anyone. See: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bamboo0515/script-894237366.html. If there is a better way using their options (Shell, Windows PowerShell, /bin/sh or cmd.exe) that would be great too.
Edit: robocopy might be an option also. The basic problem is that I need to mirror the source and the destination paths, but there are folders in the destination that must remain unchanged (they get filled from another process).

Answer 1

-Exclude applies only to leaf elements, not the full path. For example, a filter -Exclude 'foo' would remove a folder named "foo" from the result list, but not its files or child folders.
Combine the parent paths you want excluded in a regular expression and use a regexp (non-)match.
$excludes = "$($pwd.Path)\test\images\folder_to_keep",
"$($pwd.Path)\test\some_other_folder\another_to_keep"
$re = ($excludes | ForEach-Object {[regex]::Escape($_)}) -join '|'
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Force | Where-Object {
$_.FullName -notmatch "^$re"
} | Remove-Item -Force