I am completely new to this shell things, so bear with me on a totally simple question.

I somehow managed to change something in my terminal window, because the 'ls' command shows me all files (including the so called dotfiles) as if I have used 'ls -a'.

I have searched on many places on the Internet, but the most I have found are some exotic manners of putting an alias on .bashrc to make 'ls' behave as 'ls -a'.

I have checked my .bashrc and there is no such alias.

What do I have to do to use 'ls' and make it not show dotfiles.

Does 'history; type ls; grep ls -r ~/.bash*' /etc/bash* /etc/profile*; ls -altr /etc/bash* /etc/profile*' show something that looks like an edit or echo command or files recently edited to look at? Does '\ls;' or 'unalias ls; ls;' show ls usage as you want?

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also check type ls and which ls to find out what was really executed

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Welcome aboard.

Did you run ls from sudo or as the root user(?), (as it will normally show all files, compared to a regular user).

+1 for "type ls".
Prolly aliased and this will show it.
To not use the alias temporarily, use
or set another.
I use (no dot files).

First of all, thank you to everyone who helped me... your insights are really valuable as I still find a little alien this shell things.

@unSpawn : 'type ls' showed me: ls is aliased to /bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS'
So I used: 'echo $LS_OPTIONS' and found: '--color=tty -F -a -b -T 0' where I believe '-a' is the culprit. So now, I am wondering where this could be defined.

I also tried '\ls' and I got a plain listing.

good job, so far.
A temp 'fix' is to add to your ~/.bashrc a new ls alias
and restart your terminal app.

I would be looking in ~/.bashrc so see whether $LS_OPTIONS is defined there....
However! That is on my system which Iam familiar with. I think it might help if you tell us which distribution you are running and what changes have been made to it recently (updating packages, installing things, ...) since these things don't change themselves.

I am at a Bluehost hosting account (I believe it's running CentOS) so I have no way to know if an update was made.

There is nothing in my .bashrc file that points to setting the $LS_OPTIONS or ls. Maybe I could just redefine it without '-a' but I was wondering if there could be a solution that felt less hacky.

Try "grep -r LS_OPTIONS /etc/bash* /etc/profile*"

Those are the system-wide profiles that get sourced before your personal one, it could be getting in there.