MacOS – How to save root aliases permanently

All you need to do is type alias at the prompt and any active aliases will be listed.

Aliases are usually loaded at initialization of your shell so look in .bash_profile or .bashrc in your home directory.

unalias will only work for your current session. Unless you find where it is defined and loaded, it will be loaded again when you start a new Terminal session.

~/.bashrc gets run for both login and non-login shells, ~/.bash_profile only gets run for login shells.

See login shell vs non-login shell

As per comment from Chris Page:

You should put most of your customizations (including aliases) in ~/.bashrc and have ~/.bash_profile run ~/.bashrc, so they apply to both login (~/.bash_profile) and non-login (~/.bashrc) shells. Also, decide which of these should be "primary" and if the profile is your choice, tack on the rc file at the end. If the rc file is primary, source that at the beginning of your profile

These lines should be in the file ~/.bash_profile:

if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ] ; then
  source $HOME/.bashrc
fi

This will include ~/.bashrc for login shells and in the order you wish if one file depends upon the other based on what you are setting.

You can't pass arguments to aliases. Aliases are just text substitutions without further logic.

But you can use shell functions to achieve the same result:

function pman() {
    if [ -x /usr/bin/open ]; then
        man -t "$1" | open -f -a Preview
    else
        man "$1"
    fi
}

The if-then-else part is there just to make sure it also works on non-OSX systems.

To define a function, just include the definition from above into your ~/.bash_profile. Usage is identical to aliases or any other command: pman ls.

As @stuffe pointed out in a comment keeping aliases/functions in a separate file has its advantages (especially it allows you to re-read your aliases/functions into the current shell without executing any setup stuff from .bashrc or .bash_profile). To do this, create a separate file called .alias, .functions or similar and add

test -e ~/.alias && . ~/.alias

to .bashrc or .bash_profile.