It starts in the current working directory.
It removes the empty directory and its ancestors (unless the ancestor contains other elements than the empty directory itself).
It will print a failure message for every directory that isn't empty.
This command handles correctly directory names containing single or double quotes, spaces or newlines.
If you do not want only to remove all the ancestors, just use:
find . -empty -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir
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