Why is the /var/log/lastlog file so large?

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The size of the file /var/log/lastlog can appear to be overly large on some systems, most especially in 64 bit architectures.

ls -la /var/log/lastlog
-r--------    1 root     root     1254130450140 Jul 27 08:25 /var/log/lastlog

From the above example, the lastlog file is reporting to be ~1.2TB in size. This file is large since it contain...

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