In shell scripting, what does .[!.]* mean?

Question

A command that prints a list of files and folders in the current directory along with their total sizes is du -sh *. That command alone doesn\'t, however, list

Answer 1

It's a globbing pattern that basically tells bash to find all files starting with a ., followed by any character but a .and containing any character after that.

See this page for a great explanation of bash globbing patterns.