Use the TAB keys to go to the selected files box, move the cursor (using the arrow keys) to the item you wish to de-select and then press 'u' or 'U' and after confirmation, the file will be de-selected. Alternatively, you can press 'u' or 'U' on the file in the selected files box or the directory box.
The same as above.
You can press 'y', 'Y', 'n', 'N' to select yes or no directly. Alternatively, use TAB or spacebar to move the highlight between YES and NO. Press ENTER when the highlight is on what you wish.
To facilitate incremental backups on an ever changing UN*X directory tree, when you select a directory for backup, taper only stores the directory name, not its contents of subdirectories. This means that it is not possible to select a directory (eg. /usr) and then enter the directory and then unselect a subdirectory (eg. /usr/tmp). If you try and do this, taper will give you an error message.
From version 6.8, taper provides two mechanisms for excluding a single file or subdirectory.
To make taper run faster, the display is updated every second. Since taper can transfer small files to/from the tape device quicker than this, taper doesn't display them. There is a substantial improvement in backup performance using this technique.
This is usually caused by an incorrect ncurses setup. Try to get the latest version of ncurses, do a full compile and install. See my home page NEED_WEB_ADDRESS/ for a precompiled package.