Windows – how to “preserve internal directory structure” when unzipping on windows

I am not sure you can do what you are suggesting using the graphical user interface, but you can certainly from the command line:

FOR %i IN (*.*) DO 7z.exe a "%~ni.7z" "%i"

You would need to change directory (the cd command) to the F:\Downloads directory first, or whatever directory you would want to perform the mass compression. Also, it is easy enough to substitute in *.exe or whatever extension you want to filter for to just compress those documents.

And the secret decoder ring:

• %i is a variable that holds the file name for each step in the loop
• (*.*) is the selection criteria, it could easily be *.exe or similar
• 7z.exe is the command line version of 7-Zip
• %~ni - this expands the %i variable to just the file name - no extension

If you wanted to just add the folders for a given directory, the command is a bit more complex as by default FOR just works with files. We need to feed it some additional information:

FOR /F "usebackq delims=?" %i IN (`DIR /B /A:D`) DO 7z.exe a "%i.7z" "%i"

This works because of a few pieces of what seems like magic:

• /F tells FOR to iterate over the expanded value in ()
• usebackq tells FOR that I am going to pass a command and use the output to iterate
• delims=? tells FOR that I want to break tokens apart on the ? - an illegal character in file names and directories. I only want one token.
• The /B in DIR is for bare format - just the name
• The /A:D in DIR is for restricting the results by attribute, the D is for directories

If you want to encapsulate this inside of a batch file, the only change you will need to make is to double escape the %i variable:

FOR %%i IN (*.*) DO 7z.exe a "%%~ni.7z" "%%i"

why not using 7zip command line edition, that you can download from here?

inside this zip file you can find a help file in CHm format that has all switches and commands that can help you during your batch process.