$re = '/^elasticmapreduce\/j-.*\/node\/i-.*\/(?!(applications(\/.*)*))/m';
$str = 'elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/applications/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-proxyserver-ip.log.2020-05-07-00.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/applications/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-timelineserver-ip.out.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/applications/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-proxyserver-ip.log.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/applications/hive/user/hive/hive.log.2020-05-07.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/applications
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/bootstrap-actions/master.log.2020-05-07-00.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/bootstrap-actions
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/daemons/instance-state/instance-state.log-2020-05-08-13-30.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/daemons/setup-dns.log.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/provision-node/abc123/stderr.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/provision-node/apps-phase/0/abc123/stderr.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/provision-node/reports/0/abc123/ip.ec2.internal/201805270306.yaml.gz
elasticmapreduce/j-abc123/node/i-abc123/setup-devices/setup_var_log_dir.log.gz';
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
// Print the entire match result
var_dump($matches);
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php