Lost my .bash_profile. Is it possible to recover it from Time Machine backups?
You do not even need to enter Time Machine, although your Time Machine drive must be connected and mounted.

In Terminal, which by default opens to your $HOME directory, you can use the following command, literally, to copy the .bash_profile file to your $HOME directory:

cp -av /Volumes/*/Backups.backupdb/*/Latest/*/Users/$USER/.bash_profile .


Note that this command assumes there is only one volume attached that has a Backups.backupdb directory in its root directory.