But I guess I wasn't clear enough.

Actually, I think that I understood you correctly, but I probably failed to properly describe what I tested.

Here's the file and directory layout of what I tested (and the contents of test.pl is the code from my previous post):

C:\test\test.pl
C:\test\test_dir\file1.txt
C:\test\test_dir\file2.txt
[download]

After running perl test.pl, I got a new file: C:\test\test.zip. Here's the contents of test.zip:

test_dir\file1.txt
test_dir\file2.txt
[download]

As you can see, the file and directory structure was fully and correctly added into the new zip file. And a quick check shows that the two text files' modification date/time stamp is preserved in the new zip file too. I believe that is the basic idea of what you are trying to do. However, I suspect that you'll need to make modifications to the code that I posted in order to fully do what you're trying to do.