I've been implementing this command for the past few days now and I wished I did it earlier.

It functions similar to sortBed in bedtools but uses the bash sort which can be used in pipes

Find your .bashrc file in your home directory

$ cd $HOME
$ vi .bashrc # vi ~/.bashrc should work fine from any directory

Add this to .bashrc

alias sortbed="sort -k1,1 -k2,2g "

Save and source your .bashrc to get it to work

$ source ~/.bashrc

Example of use:

$ intersectBed -a in.bed -b /segDup_unmappable.bed -wao |
  sortbed |uniq | cut -f 1,2,3,8  >in_segDup_unmappable_overlap.txt

This intersects a bed file of chr, start, end to a list of segmental duplications and unmappable regions in hg19. It also pipes to bash commands to only remove the in positions and the number of base pairs overlapping it.

sortbed is used to sort the output and uniq is applied to return only unique lines. You can treat sortbed like sort. Just a nice shortcut I thought others might like.