Sounds like, at best, a great way to find obsolete copies of nvidia-smi.exe shipped with installed but inactive driver versions.

On all my Windows/Nvidia systems, the current version of nvidia-smi.exe is present in %SystemRoot%\System32.

OTOH, …\FileRepository*\nvidia-smi.exe matches anywhere from one to eight versions, dating back to 2023.

Perhaps this is only true because I use official Nvidia mechanisms (.exe installer from Nvidia Web site or Nvidia-supplied app) to install drivers, rather than Windows Update or INF install?

Incidentally, the wildcard …\FileRepository\nvdm* suggested in the Stack Overflow answer returns zero directories on my systems, as all Nvidia driver repository directories start with either nv_dispi (GeForce) or nv_dispwi (workstation).

Which makes sense, because obviously the INF file name used to generate these directory names is subject to change without notice.

In any case, per "nvidia-smi --help":

  Note that the functionality of NVSMI is exposed through the NVML C-based
  library. See the NVIDIA developer website for more information about NVML.
  Python wrappers to NVML are also available.  The output of NVSMI is
  not guaranteed to be backwards compatible; NVML and the bindings are backwards
  compatible.
  
  http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-management-library-nvml/
  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nvidia-ml-py/