unfamiliar quoting convention in a bash script

I'm trying to debug a bash script on macos. The business end of the script is just:

$JAVA_COMMAND $CLASS $*

The command line includes /a/b/d/*, where the files in /a/b/d have names in Arabic.

When I run with sh -x, each of those files is echoed as $'/a/b/c/thearabic'

Where does the开发者_StackOverflow $' convention come from, and what does it mean?

From the Bash man page:

Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard. Backslash escape sequences, if present, are decoded as follows:

...

The expanded result is single-quoted, as if the dollar sign had not been present. A double-quoted string preceded by a dollar sign ($) will cause the string to be translated according to the current locale. If the current locale is C or POSIX, the dollar sign is ignored. If the string is translated and replaced, the replacement is double-quoted.

man page