The more detail we know about the problem, the great the likely hood of success! I tried again with a couple of simple approaches...shown below..

Approach #1: All solutions must have the sequence of "tex" followed by "exception" or "exceptions". So the first grep (read these grep "stacks" from the bottom up), takes care of that situation. Then the next grep says if "tex" occurs more than once, then this is a bad line. I don't know if "tex:tex:exception" occurs or not? If so then this approach would filter that out. But if 'tex' only can occur once then this works fine.

Approach #2: Starts the same as a Approach #1, but the second grep says that if "tex" follows exception(s) then this is a "bad line" (remember the first grep{} assured that we are looking at a line that has a "tex..blah..exceptions", here we are looking to see if some 'tex' follows that exception part, and if so filter it out.

I don't see the need for any fancy look ahead/behind voodoo. Yes, there is a place and a situation for that, but I would go with something simple to understand. If this doesn't do what you want, then modify the @data and the #desired is comment section to more accurately describe what you need.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @data = ('exception:mex',
            'qwerty',
            'tex:exception:mex',
            'exception:mex',
            'exception:tex',
            'tex:exception',
            'tex:exception:tex',
            'tex : exceptions:mex',
            'tex:exception:mex:tex',
            'asdf');
           
#desired is: tex:exception:mex           
#            tex:exception
#            tex : exceptions:mex

my @matches = grep{                        #approach #1
                    my @texes = m/tex/g; 
                    @texes <=1
                  }
              grep{/tex.*?exception(s)?/}
              @data;
      
print join ("\n",@matches),"\n\n";  

@matches = grep{ !/exception(s)?.*?tex/}   #approach #2
           grep{/tex.*?exception(s)?/}
           @data;

print join ("\n",@matches),"\n"; 

__END__
Prints:

tex:exception:mex
tex:exception
tex : exceptions:mex

tex:exception:mex
tex:exception
tex : exceptions:mex
[download]

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