There are several ways to convert a closure or interior operation to a different operation that has particular desirable properties. In this paper, we axiomatize three ways to do so, drawing on disparate examples from the literature, including tight closure, basically full closure, and various versions of integral closure. In doing so, we explore several such desirable properties, including hereditary, residual, and cofunctorial, and see how they interact with other properties such as the finitistic property.

We describe an algorithm for computing parameter-test-ideals in certain local Cohen–Macaulay rings. The algorithm is based on the study of a Frobenius map on the injective hull of the residue field of the ring and on the application of Sharp’s notion of ‘special ideals’. Our techniques also provide an algorithm for computing indices of nilpotency of Frobenius actions on top local cohomology modules of the ring and on the injective hull of its residue field. The study of nilpotent elements on injective hulls of residue fields also yields a great simplification of the proof of the celebrated result in the article Generators of D-modules in positive characteristic (J. Alvarez-Montaner, M. Blickle and G. Lyubeznik, Math. Res. Lett. 12 (2005), 459–473).

Suppose that R is a two-dimensional normal standard-graded domain over a finite field. We prove that there exists a uniform Frobenius test exponent b for the class of homogeneous ideals in R generated by at most n elements. This means that for every ideal I in this class we have that $f^{p^b}\in I^{[p^b]}$ if and only if $f\in I^{\rm F}$. This gives in particular a finite test for the Frobenius closure. On the other hand we show that there is no uniform bound for Frobenius test exponent for all homogeneous ideals independent of the number of generators. Under similar assumptions we prove also the existence of a bound for tight closure test ideal exponents for ideals generated by at most n elements.