diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/site/markdown/SingleCluster.md.vm b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/site/markdown/SingleCluster.md.vm
index bbea16855e5..8153dce5c3f 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/site/markdown/SingleCluster.md.vm
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/site/markdown/SingleCluster.md.vm
@@ -157,8 +157,7 @@ The following instructions are to run a MapReduce job locally. If you want to ex
 
 4.  Make the HDFS directories required to execute MapReduce jobs:
 
-          $ bin/hdfs dfs -mkdir /user
-          $ bin/hdfs dfs -mkdir /user/<username>
+          $ bin/hdfs dfs -mkdir -p /user/<username>
 
 5.  Copy the input files into the distributed filesystem: