Another Garmin file mystery .... Jeff.BIN

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02042-jeff-spec.pdf

Sounds like a good reason to keep hidden things hidden.

dobs108

Now we all know what it means.

Ditto on the 'huh?' for me as well as the description is above my pay grade so I stopped skimming after a few sentences in the provided link.

I do commend our first two to post as I had never seen a Jeff before, and if I had, I'd never think to expect a file format rather than something a guy named, ah....Jeff, had written.

Just delete it and be done with it.

It will probably jut rewrite the file again

Not necessarily.

Remove the SD card, delete the file from the Garmin, then delete it on the SD card and reinsert card in Garmin.

We can talk about this, wonder about it, or just laugh at the joke or take action. I don't see any harm in trying to delete this spam/malware.

Could this be someone's idea of a useless Easter egg, the things you can find in much written software?

No, it's nuisance-ware, it just keeps cloning itself from device to device. What fun!

I do appreciate phranc's post, but like CraigW it is beyond me to understand its purpose on the DriveLuxe or why it was created on the SD card. I am tempted to try KenSny's approach, but haven't done it yet. One thing for sure is that there is something in the Garmin boot up software that creates the file on the SD card. I have never heard any cases of malware on a Garmin device, but I suppose anything is possible.

I did a hex dump of the original file. There is not much recognizable data in there, but a few text string fragments as shown below. These string fragments do make it seem like it is referencing something in the Driveluxe software and/or files.

SYS_LOG2BIN
G a r m i  in D e v i c e
GARMIN~1XML
BRITIS~1
B r i t i  (s h _ E n g l i
HELPDE~1XML
H e l p D  be f T a b l e
VIEWIN~5HTM
i g n a l  [_ S t a t u s .
V i e w i  [n g _ G P S
Be r _ A l  ÷e r t s . h t m
V i e w i  ÷n g _ W e a t h
VOICE_~1HTM
V o i c e  ¤_ C o m m a n d

...you will find this useful tidbit of information.
JEFF can be used with benefits on all kinds of platform.
JEFF’s most immediate interest is for deploying portable applications on small footprint devices. JEFF provides dramatic savings of dynamic memory and execution time without sacrificing any of the flexibility usually attached to the use of non-pre-linked portable code.
JEFF is especially important to provide a complete solution to execute portable programs of which code size is bigger than the available dynamic memory.
JEFF is also very important when fast reactivity of programs is important. By avoiding the extra-processing related to loading into dynamic memory and formatting classes at runtime, JEFF provides a complete answer to the problem of class-loading slow-down.
I'm not a computer programmer, but it sounds like it may enhance the performance of the device. I would send an email to Garmin and ask them if they could explain this (JEFF) to me. Maybe they can and maybe they can't, but it would be worth a shot, especially if you could get in touch with one of their programmers.

muell9k Wrote
You stated you recently purchased a refurbished Driveluxe 50 LMTHD. I'm wondering if the individual who refurbished it managed somehow to add a folder named "Journal" with the file Jeff.BIN into it. The size is 32K, not very large file for a .Bin file.

Give the Diagnostic folder a look.

On my 2460LMT I see two files in the "Diagnostic" folder named
sys_log1.bin 2,048kb 11/1/2017
sys_log1_.bin 2,048kb 11/12/2011

My scan of the aforementioned pdf led me to think of it as a next generation improvement to capabilities that Java aimed to provide "cross-platform" back in its heyday.