Can you restore only the files that have recently changed with Time Machine?

Greetings,
Before i ask my question,  i'll give a bit of background as to my issue.
I was editing my $PATH within the ~/.bash_profile file and accidently overwrote my $PATH. So now simple terminal commands such as open or 'ls' no longer work. In order to edit the file, I need to change the defaults to allow me to see hidden files, but I can't do that because the defaults command stopped working after I screwed up the $PATH. Also, I used the echo commadn to verify that the previous $PATH no longer exists. The environment variable now just points to an empty folder I accidently set it to in TextEdit.
So, I have Time Machine running, and it backs up to a Time Capsule. I have the hourly backups that I can restore to, but when I start the restore, it crawled up towards 200,000 files before I finally decided that wasn't right and decided to post a question (it's still "preparing to copy"). I had to select the OS X Volume to restore from my one hour old backup, since I can't restore the folder the bash_profile exists within (it is hidden) or so I assumed.\
Now my question, it seems that Time Machine is doing a full restore of every file in the backup and not just the files it incrementally changed between its hourly backups. Why does it do this? My restore process should have just been a couple of minutes, restoring a couple hundred or so files at most. Restoring several hundred thousand files seems stupid when the I select a backup that is one hour old. Is there anyway to set it up so I can restore incrementally?
Thanks,
Johnathon.
Message was edited by: Scionwest
A quick note, I performed the restore from within the Time Machine while booted into OS X; the restore did not take place in the special bootup tool available. Why it does not provide an option to simply restore the files changed over the last hour is mind boggling to me

You are making this way too complicated. In Terminal, choose Shell > New Command…. In the text box that opens, enter bash --noprofile . A Terminal window will open that does not use your .bash_profile, so the bad $PATH will not be an issue. Now you can remove, move, or edit .bash_profile.

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