Question:

I have a mysql instance that needs to dump csv files into a jenkins workspace. Unfortunately, Jenkins has permissions 755 for the workspace directory, and I need to be able to create and delete jobs of this type very often, so manual configuration doesn't work. How do I change the default permissions on these directories without writing a script do do it?

Just change the permissions on the root workspace directory. The workspaces for each job will be in subdirectories underneath the root, so they will inherit the root directory's permissions.

chown -R jenkins_user:jenkins_group /path_to_workspace_root