Give a short description of the gzip utility. What compression algorithm does it use, and what degree of compression is it typically able to achieve? What are some similarities and differences from the compress utility?

What will be an ideal response?

The GNU zip (gzip) utility uses a Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm (LZ77) that varies slightly from the one used by the compress utility. Typically, this algorithm yields better compression than the one used by compress. The average compression ratio for gzip is 60 to 70 percent.?Like the compress utility, symbolic links are not compressed by the gzip utility unless the -f option is given, and the -r option can be used to compress all files in a certain directory. In addition, the ownership, modification, and access times of compressed files are preserved by default, and the -v option to the gzip command can be used to display the compression ratio and filename. However, gzip uses the .gz filename extension by default.