I'm trying to sell the use of gzip instead of compress in our department. One issue I'm having (which is a showstopper) is that I lose the ownership when gzipping and gunzipping, though it's mentioned all over the web that files are supposed to keep ownership.

Example:
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ms32345 staff 2847 May 01 09:14 Do_Peyton_pd_Queries.ss

gzip -9f Do_Peyton_pd_Queries.ss

-rwxrwxrwx 1 ad87398 staff 1370 May 01 09:14 Do_Peyton_pd_Queries.ss.gz

Is there something I'm missing? We need to keep ownership for auditing purposes.

you just can use tar instead

and then gzip it

The losing ownership thing is odd. What are the flags on the gzip executable? It might be setuid for some reason I cannot fathom.

The permissions for the executable are:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root system 26 Mar 18 2004 gzip -> /usr/opt/freeware/bin/gzip

And that link's permissions are:

-rwxr-xr-x 3 root system 66303 May 27 2003 gzip