The problem with answering a question like this is that the "commands" in *nix are individual programs stored in a location listed in your $PATH variable
Code:
echo $PATH |tr ':' '\n'; file -L `which sed`
.
If the program is there, you can probably use it, if not you may be able to either get a binary or compile it in from source.
I have had a look and there does not seem to be a standard which says "to be [standard] compliant there must be a [standard] compliant version of the program 'tail' ".
Having said that, linux is a great place to learn unix.