7-Zip

As far as I can tell from doing a few experiments with 7-Zip,
reading the documentation that comes with it, and browsing a
few pages of the 7-Zip Support forum at SourceForge, 7-Zip
entirely lacks an absolutely basic feature of WinZip, which
is essential for saving and restoring complex structures of
files and directories (folders): namely, that you can add to
a specified archive any specified set of files together with
all its path information. This seems especially odd, as 7-Zip
is perfectly capable of understanding the directory structure
of an archive created by WinZip. It displays the information
differently: whereas WinZip shows the path information in a
column headed "Path", 7-Zip shows directories as icons in its
own window, and gives a "flat" display of all the files and
directories in any directory you select, thus behaving rather
like a version of Windows Explorer (and indeed it is described
as a "File Manager", rather than a compression and archiving
utility).

I know I'm inclined to give up too easily, so am I missing
something here? Is it a question of reading more carefully
through all the documentation on the command-line version of
the program, with all its interacting options?

--
Angus Rodgers