[6ren]

EDIT [missed the edit window] whoops, I see ctrl-r is "reverse-search-history" (not "history-search-backward"), it matches your input to any part of the history (so the prefix issue doesn't arise). So you could just type the hostname, and it will pick out the most recent line in the history that matches - it needn't be at the beginning of the line. You can hit ctrl-r again to go to a matching line further up.

ctrl-s goes back down again, but not working for me, apparently because my gnome terminal intercepts it before bash's readline sees it, using it for xon/xoff according to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/791765/unable-to-forward-... This "fixes" it (by disabling the STOP feature of the terminal), so ctrl-s works to search down.

  stty -ixon