Big Goof- please help

[Luis Ortega]

I was in Finder and saw a bunch of files under the search for folders on the left hand pane. There were more than 10,000 files in folders named today, yesterday, past week, all images, all movies, all documents, and I assumed that these were just history items so I selected everything and sent them to the trash.
Now when I try to open any application, it says that it's in the trash and can't be used until I remove it from the trash.
Have I completely trashed the system?
Is there any way to put all this stuff back where it belongs so that programs will work again?
Apart from the applications, there are thousands of odd files of all sorts in the trash now. Are those also necessary to get the applications to work again?
I can't begin to guess where they all need to go.
As you can imagine, I'm new to Macs and don't know what I'm doing. In Windows, items in history folders are just shortcuts to the originals, so I wrongly assumed that it was the same on Macs and figured I was just tidying up the computer.
I've spent the past three days installing a ton of programs and I don't really want to have to reinstall everything, and probably OSX, again from scratch.
Please help. What can I do now???

[gauchogolfer]

Have you been backing up with Time Machine? If so, you could restore your system to an earlier state before you erased everything.

[xUKHCx]

cmd+z (undo)

Although I am assuming you have done stuff since then that this won't work.

I feel your pain. This is exactly why the Trash needs a windows style restore option.

[Luis Ortega]

Well, a day later and I am back up to speed after completely reinstalling OSX and everything again on a nice clean drive.
Being sort of a geek, it was an interesting experience to install OSX from scratch and customize it.
I imagine that it will take some time to reach the same level of understanding of Macs that I have of Windows since I've been building video editing systems for 10 years and nothing in Windows fazes me anymore. I sort of miss the ability to tinker with the guts of a Mac, knowing that I'll never be able to just strip the insides and change motherboards and such whenever I feel the need to upgrade, and I don't look forward to being at the mercy of some pimply-faced "genius" if I ever need to have my Macs fixed. I can strip and fix any Windows machine myself if the need arises right at home on my own. I will miss that.
I do find it unbelievable that the Mac trash has no restore files option. For a computer that seems aimed at making things easy for the user, it seems like a ridiculous lapse of software design. Any chance of that being included in OSX? Is there any third party software that can do it for the Mac?

[xUKHCx]

Send feedback (http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html) to apple. I always do when I want something changed such as this.