Covers of acts over monoids II

In 1981 Edgar Enochs conjectured that every module over a unitary ring has a flat cover. He finally proved this conjecture in 2001, in a paper that included an independent proof by Bican and El Bashir. Enochs had in fact considered different types of covers as early as 1963, for example injective and torsion free covers, and since then a great deal of effort has been spent on their study. In 2008, Mahmoudi and Renshaw initiated the study of flat covers of acts over monoids but their definition of cover was slightly different from that of Enochs. Recently, Bailey and Renshaw produced some preliminary results on the ‘other’ type of cover and it is this work that is extended in this paper. We consider free, divisible, torsion free and injective covers and demonstrate that in some cases the results are quite different from the module case.