Aliasing a command with parameter supplied to another command

Question

Namely: I want to alias tail -f to less +F but let tail with any other parameter supplied work the same way as before.

Answer 1

This is slightly beyond the powers of what shell aliases provide (assuming bash). You could define a function:

function tail() {
    if [ "$1" == '-f' ]; then
        shift
        less +F "$@"
     else
         command tail "$@"
     fi
 }

When you type tail, this will now refer to the function defined above, which checks its first argument, if any, for equality with -f, and if it matches, runs less +F on the rest of the original arguments (shift removes the first of the original arguments, -f). Otherwise, it calls the command tail with all of the original arguments (calling the built-in command is necessary to avoid an infinite loop; without it, tail would refer to the function being defined, causing an infinite loop).