another problem is that I need GENE to always be first (not regular lexicographic sort)
That's doable...here's a sample (the sed and awk can easily be replaced by perl...left as an exercise):
#!/bin/ksh

awk 'BEGIN {
  SORTCD["GENE"] = 1
  SORTCD["CDS"]  = 2
  SORTCD["RNA"]  = 3
}
{ print SORTCD[$3], $0 }' <<EOT |
1 1 RNA
1 1 GENE
1 2 CDS
EOT
sort -n -k2,3 -k1,1 | sed -e 's/^[0-9]* //'

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In reply to Re^3: sorting a file - multilevel by runrig
in thread sorting a file - multilevel by ini2005

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